ozeco41
Philosopher
I was aware of your concerns hence the reason I accepted the offer to discuss. My original suggestion which I thought we agreed was that the Bazant column crushing model could be more valid for application to the real WTC 9/11 collapses IF the energetics bit of the maths was made floor joist shearing energetics rather than column crushing energetics. Your current position rejecting the Bazant starting point - which was the basis of the proposed discussion - makes any further discussion moot.Well, the reason I brought this up is that I don't (yet) accept the first premise (except in the sense that "at one extreme," floor spans begin at zero?). I believe it's virtually impossible in a conventionally designed building to crush columns by loading floors (with impact or otherwise), so your premise would require that with shorter spans, there would be proportionally more cases where columns directly received enough additional force to buckle. While there might be more columns crushed, having more columns also means each is less significant in the overall collapse. Also, as I said, I believe the total column load capacities and floor connection shear capacities depend on floor loads rather than on column spacing, so it's not immediately obvious to me that failure mode proportions would change much with different (practical) spacings.
Are you discussing details from some of Major_Tom's explanations? If so where from?And since we're apparently not going to hear any more about ROOSD from Major_Tom, have you given any thought to the supposed "funnel" effect? I think it's the second most misleading part of ROOSD. Most of debris went straight down because of gravity, not the perimeter wall, and furthermore whatever minor effect the wall had, it would have been exactly the same with shorter column spacing.
My own view aligns with what you say EXCEPT the reference to column spacing which I cannot recall from any of M_T's explanations.
More importantly IMO the amount of "constraint" imposed by the perimeter wall has zero effect on the point of contention under discussion here. That point being that the mechanism which actually happened - whatever we call it - was the one which saw material falling in the office space tube cause floor joist disconnections which in turn precipitated perimeter peel off. How is that misleading?
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