posted on Mar, 8 2010 @ 09:04 PM
Originally posted by TrueAmerican
Yeah, you know, I didn't quite understand that either. The fire did clearly burn a lot hotter.
I was pretty interested in seeing if it DID fail. Mainly because I don't believe the nano-thermite story, in terms of energetics. The amount of
energy you'd need to deliver in order to heat a chunk of I-beam that size to the point that it softens doesn't seem obtainable from a thin film.
With stock thermate, the numbers for the volume you'd need to soften it to failure are comparatively high. For a metal-halogen 'super thermite'
(I've worked with a couple of them), a paint film of it still doesn't seem to have enough energy per unit volume to get the job done, and I'm a
real proponent of metal-halogen nano-composites, mostly as explosives charges.
I got the impression they cut away before the finale, which would have been interesting to see. The fact that they didn't show the beam bend or melt
and they cut away in mid-burn would seem to indicate that it didn't in fact fail, but who knows.
It might be interesting to get the prof's name and ask what the outcome was.