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Hardfire: Szamboti / Chandler / Mackey

Of course the most spectacular bridge that was destroyed by wind was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.



Truthers who think that structural failure requires explosives for all structures are wrong.

The WTCs' might've had design flaws built into them, but they held for quite a while before collapsing.
 
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Show you? I'm sure you've seen loading failures. I've linked the balsa wood bridge competitions before. When the structures are overloaded the failure is sudden and the acceleration is very close to g.

Here's one

and another one

The second one's great, it explodes!!!!

I would have thought something about design would have entered the picture with his question...
Things like... Where's the load applied? How are columns distributed within the building floor plan? Design doesn't just consider the number of columns necessary to hold something up, it also considers load paths. You can have a sufficient number of coulmns that could be capable of supporting the loads above assuming that the loads run vertical with the columns, but then the same assembly may fail if the load if off axis; for example if it must not only support a vertical load, but a moment as well.

Why he's asking when he should already have been aware of this is beyond me.
 
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I think Tony needs to tell us why he thinks that static failure (a 100,000 ton structure) couldn't collapse part of a building on top of itself to bring down what were essentually tube within a tube structures & turn it into a global collaspe.

The building structure below was designed to handle several times the load above it.

This is why in the Verinage demolitions they drop the upper section through a distance to develop enough momentum to crush the lower section and itself through successive impacts where there is evidence of deceleration and load amplification.

Of course, the upper section experiences little resistance and accelerates while going through the removed stories in the Verinage demolitions.

The velocity curve for WTC 1 looks very similar to that measured of the fall of the upper section through the removed stories in a Verinage demolition.
 
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Now you are proving why you deserve to be called a clown.

There is a limit to an unresisted acceleration due to gravity and that would be 100% of gravity.

Hmm.. the consequences of your logic are absurd. Therefore your logic does not hold. Reductio Ad Absurdum it is called.
 
The building structure below was designed to handle several times the load above it.

I guess that's the "factor of 3" you mention from time to time. What does it exactly mean?

If the falling upper section of WTC1 had 17 floors, does it mean that the floor below could had handled up to 17*3=51 floors? Is that what you mean?
 
The building structure below was designed to handle several times the load above it.

This is why in the Verinage demolitions they drop the upper section through a distance to develop enough momentum to crush the lower section and itself through successive impacts where there is evidence of deceleration and load amplification.

Of course, the upper section experiences little resistance and accelerates while going through the removed stories in the Verinage demolitions.

The velocity curve for WTC 1 looks very similar to that measured of the fall of the upper section through the removed stories in a Verinage demolition.

Tony, those are very good observations but do you have evidence that it was a demolition?

The floors were already pre-weakened by Flight 175 & 11's impact. Then you have the resulting fires which made the structure already unsound because it weakened the steel to cause a collapse.
 
I guess that's the "factor of 3" you mention from time to time. What does it exactly mean?

If the falling upper section of WTC1 had 17 floors, does it mean that the floor below could had handled up to 17*3=51 floors? Is that what you mean?

I am not sure where he got the 3 from, but more importantly the floors are not designed to hold the building above, the columns are.

(it is not just semantics, but a rather important part in his missing jolt)
 
LOL! I just love this little skit from the Muppets called "Pigs in Space":



Could there be some kind of Truther connection in that skit? ;)
 
I guess that's the "factor of 3" you mention from time to time. What does it exactly mean?

If the falling upper section of WTC1 had 17 floors, does it mean that the floor below could had handled up to 17*3=51 floors? Is that what you mean?

Yes.
 
I fail to see why some posters here find it necessary to try and make fun of how Tony looks or how he performed in an oral debate....seems a bit childish.

Attack the argument not the person.

I disagree very strongly with Tony and I think he is allowing his ideology to overrule his engineering sense, but that is no reason to try and take cheap shots against the guy.
 

Then you should check equation 1 in Bazant's paper.

The dynamic load was 31 times higher than the static load. That means that the impact was equivalent to statically supporting 31*17=517 floors. So according to your "factor of 3" critera, the building falls anyway.
 
I am not sure where he got the 3 from, but more importantly the floors are not designed to hold the building above, the columns are.

(it is not just semantics, but a rather important part in his missing jolt)

And of course the factor of 3 refers to a static load in as-built condition. The impact load would have been something closer to 8x the static load if not more since the 8-fold figure assumes a one-floor drop, not the 4-6 floors damaged in the event. His missing jolt paper of course denies there was such a dynamic load present.
 
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I am not sure where he got the 3 from, but more importantly the floors are not designed to hold the building above, the columns are.

(it is not just semantics, but a rather important part in his missing jolt)

The columns at each floor are designed to hold several times the load above them.

As for the factor of safety, the core column cross sections and steel type have been released, we know the weight of the building above the 98th floor of WTC 1 from Gregory Urich's mass analysis, and we can determine cross section of the perimeter columns from Urich's mass anlysis also.

The core cross sectional area at the 98th floor was 2,645 sq. inches and the perimeter 3,682 sq. inches for a total of 6,327 sq. inches. The weight above was 69,303,00 lbs. We also know from the Engineering News Record that the unit stress of both the core columns and perimeter columns was kept the same at each story to avoid differential deflection and floor warpage so the core and perimeter columns at each story had the same stress.

To find the stress divide the total weight above by the cross section of the columns at a particular story. For the 98th floor you get 10,953 psi, and if you look at other stories you will find the column compressive stresses to be approximately 11,000 psi.

The core columns were made from 36,000 and 42,000 psi steel. Divide that by the 11,000 psi stress and you get a minimum of 3.27 factor of safety. This is for compressive rupture. Buckling could occur at about 95% of that so the factor of safety was actually about 3.00 to 1 for the worst case which is buckling.

The perimeter columns were made from 65,000 psi steel at the 98th floor and were stressed to 11,000 psi by gravity loads.
 
And of course the factor of 3 refers to a static load in as-built condition. The impact load would have been something closer to 8x the static load if not more since the 8-fold figure assumes a one-floor drop, not the 4-6 floors damaged in the event. His missing jolt paper of course denies there was such a dynamic load present.

There is no evidence of a dynamic load. You need velocity loss to show there was one and there is no velocity loss observed, the upper block of WTC 1 continuously accelerates.
 
Then you should check equation 1 in Bazant's paper.

The dynamic load was 31 times higher than the static load. That means that the impact was equivalent to statically supporting 31*17=517 floors. So according to your "factor of 3" critera, the building falls anyway.

You should read the Missing Jolt paper and see where Dr. Bazant is wrong. He never measured the fall of the upper block and was presuming there was a jolt.

A 31g dynamic load was impossible and to get any amplification requires deceleration and velocity loss. There is no velocity loss observed in the fall of the upper section of WTC 1. There was no dynamic load.
 
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I fail to see why some posters here find it necessary to try and make fun of how Tony looks or how he performed in an oral debate....seems a bit childish.

I wasn't making fun of how he performed in the debate. I was making an observation that he just didn't seem prepared or composed. It translated on tape to hand waving.

I did poke fun at Ryan though, that screen shot was horrible. I couldn't figure out if it was part of the technical difficulty or they used it on purpose for effect.
 
There is no evidence of a dynamic load. You need velocity loss to show there was one and there is no velocity loss observed, the upper block of WTC 1 continuously accelerates.
No need to repeat yourself... the idiocy of your claim to the contrary has been repeated multiple times. Whether or not you can demonstrate an understanding for why your assertion is incorrect is something I have no control over.
 
The columns at each floor are designed to hold several times the load above them.

As for the factor of safety, the core column cross sections and steel type have been released, we know the weight of the building above the 98th floor of WTC 1 from Gregory Urich's mass analysis, and we can determine cross section of the perimeter columns from Urich's mass anlysis also.

The core cross sectional area at the 98th floor was 2,645 sq. inches and the perimeter 3,682 sq. inches for a total of 6,327 sq. inches. The weight above was 69,303,00 lbs. We also know from the Engineering News Record that the unit stress of both the core columns and perimeter columns was kept the same at each story to avoid differential deflection and floor warpage so the core and perimeter columns at each story had the same stress.

To find the stress divide the total weight above by the cross section of the columns at a particular story. For the 98th floor you get 10,953 psi, and if you look at other stories you will find the column compressive stresses to be approximately 11,000 psi.

The core columns were made from 36,000 and 42,000 psi steel. Divide that by the 11,000 psi stress and you get a minimum of 3.27 factor of safety. This is for compressive rupture. Buckling could occur at about 95% of that so the factor of safety was actually about 3.00 to 1 for the worst case which is buckling.

The perimeter columns were made from 65,000 psi steel at the 98th floor and were stressed to 11,000 psi by gravity loads.

If you were to strip away all supports on 1 floor, what would happen to the structure above it if it was 100,000 tons?

A: Would it drop suddenly & halt it's drop at the next floor.
B: Drop suddenly & keep going with inertia driving it downward causing global collapse.
C: Tip over & away from the structure below.
D: None of the above.
 
There is no evidence of a dynamic load. You need velocity loss to show there was one and there is no velocity loss observed, the upper block of WTC 1 continuously accelerates.

All you need to show is velocity. Why do you think you need to show velocity loss?
 

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