Origin of the paint that was found as red-gray chips - any ideas?

Thanks, Sunstealer and Oystein, for your appreciation of my googling:o)

Back to the binder (which is mostly some organic polymer - carbon stuff -, more specifically some epoxide resin in the case of Laclede primer):

In the Mark Basile data on a red-grey chip #13 (btw, he called it “Lucky Thirteen” in the lecture:o), I have found the very first attempt to determine the concentrations of elements present in the red chips. I am aware that these numbers could be only approximate and peaks heights depend on many factors, but still: the content of carbon looks to be enormous and the content of iron and aluminum is ridiculously low for any thermite.

But the same should be valid even for chips (a) to (d) in the Bentham paper, since their XEDS spectra (peaks of the main elements like C, O, Fe, Al and Si) are qualitatively similar to the “Lucky Thirteen” spectrum: in all of the spectra, carbon strongly prevails as a chemical element. So even Harrit's beloved chips (a) to (d) cannot be particles of thermite from this point of view. In the thermite, reacting particles must be in an intimate contact and cannot be separated by a huge amount of a non-reacting binder. Such a high content of the organic binder is very typical just for paints (or some glues, btw).

Almond, could you please perform another simulation of XEDS spectra of Laclede primer, now considering also carbon and oxygen (I still suppose that you omitted oxygen in the first simulation, didn't you?)?
 
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bill smith said:
Have any flecks of the red material been found without the grey layer ?
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I am not sure for Bentham paper, but HenryCo wrote in his analysis http://www.darksideofgravity.com/marseille_gb.pdf that both red-grey chips and "redred" chips (red on both sides) were found. There is also a photo of the red layer just separating from the grey layer with the comment: "Photo from an independent searcher showing the red layer from a red/gray chip separating from the gray layer: possible origin of red chips." I think all this is consistent with the hypothesis of the primer painted on some steel (slightly corroded in the course of time), since we can not expect that paint (inevitably brittle after those many years) could stick on the steel forever, namely during such cataclysmic events like collapses of the Towers:o
 
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Marokkaan said:
I hope the experts here will search the right primer paint that can cause the same effect like, these videoclips!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eLuyOqWER4

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-pFbJzTG_E&feature=player_embedded
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This is what we plan, Marokkaan: to perform some tests on the thermal behaviour of the Laclede primer paint. Concerning this video, it does not prove anything thermitic, since experiment was not carried out under argon (or under nitrogen or vacuum). Since even Mark Basile (or whoever this experimenter was) probably cannot survive in the argon (or any other inert atmosphere), I guess that this ignition experiment was performed in the ordinary air (with a lot of oxygen in it):rolleyes:
 
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Ivan Kminek said:
This is what we plan, Marokkaan: to perform some tests on the thermal behaviour of the Laclede primer paint. Concerning this video, it does not prove anything thermitic, since experiment was not carried out under argon (or under nitrogen or vacuum). Since even Mark Basile (or whoever this experimenter was) probably cannot survive in the argon (or any other inert atmosphere), I guess that this ignition experiment was performed in the ordinary air (with a lot of oxygen in it):rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Great, i hope soon you have some results, good luck.
 
Ivan Kminek said:
Almond, could you please perform another simulation of XEDS spectra of Laclede primer, now considering also carbon and oxygen (I still suppose that you omitted oxygen in the first simulation, didn't you?)?
Click to expand...

Ok, so in the first simulation, I did NOT exclude O from the analysis. Cr L peaks and the O K peak overlap almost perfectly. That big honking peak around 500 eV is the combination of Cr L and O K. As for simulating the system with carbon, I am hesitant to do so for the following reasons:

1) O and C are notoriously hard to simulate correctly. When I compare my monte carlo simulations to actual experiments, I can get most elements spot on (relative error ~ 5%), but even under ideal conditions, C and O tend to have relative errors on the order of 50% to 100%. The short, non-technical reason for these errors is that the fundamental X-ray physics at low energies is not very well known or understood.

2) Without representing the actual materials involved, the simulation isn't even a good guess. Harrit et al are using particles affixed to carbon stubs in an instrument with presumably high carbon contamination. So some of the carbon signal is actually coming from inside the instrument, and has nothing to do with the sample at all. Other parts of it might be coming from the carbon tape around the particles. To simulate the experiment accurately, we would need to know the precise operating conditions and baseline carbon contamination of the instrument we're using to measure it.

3) Pigments in epoxy represent a very complicated problem for electron probe analysis. While we might think of the two materials as intimately mixed at the macro scale, the truth is that, on the scale of single microns, you will have particles of heavier elements (pigments) in a binder of light elements (presumably, C, O, S, Cl, etc). Again, the non-technical reason this is complicated is that you have too many variables to solve for and not enough equations to do it.

That being said, I was looking at the spectrum of "suspected thermite" that Sunstealer posted, and I noticed the tail on the Si peak. It's very subtle, but if your job is to look at EDX spectra all day, you start to notice these things. I think these simulations might help our discussion:


What I've done here is simulate 3 imaginary compounds. The first is pure silicon (red line), the second is 90% Si with 10% Sr (green line), and the third is 80% Si and 20% Sr (blue line). Pay special attention to the shape of the peak between 1800 eV and 1900 eV. Do you notice the tailing? The effect of Sr is to increase the length of the tail on the Si peak. Even 20% Sr does not show up as a unique peak, but as this long tail. I think I see the same effect in Sunstealer's post of the Red/Grey layer #13.
 
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Almond, Ivan, Sunstealer: When I opened this thread, I did not even hope to get such productive results after only 5 pages!

Thanks a lot!
 
Oystein said:
Almond, Ivan, Sunstealer: When I opened this thread, I did not even hope to get such productive results after only 5 pages!

Thanks a lot!
Click to expand...
I agree. Although this is way over my head, I'm loving sucking up a perfect example of "E" in JREF.

:)

(I think I'm spending just as much time looking **** up as reading this thread :o)
 
The Almond said:
What I've done here is simulate 3 imaginary compounds. The first is pure silicon (red line), the second is 90% Si with 10% Sr (green line), and the third is 80% Si and 20% Sr (blue line). Pay special attention to the shape of the peak between 1800 eV and 1900 eV. Do you notice the tailing? The effect of Sr is to increase the length of the tail on the Si peak. Even 20% Sr does not show up as a unique peak, but as this long tail. I think I see the same effect in Sunstealer's post of the Red/Grey layer #13.
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Quite surprised and interested by that, I would have expected atleast some indication of a double peak - this is a fine demonstration as to the limitations and subtleties of EDX. I do see the tail on the Si peak for chip #13 in the slide above. Curiouser and curiouser.

Excellent work The Almond.
 
15 seconds into this Jones vid you can see a EDX spectrum of some steel they melted with an oxyacetylene torch. And at 5.10 he seems to say that this steel sample was from WTC and was from a memorial. It's identical to the spectra in samples a-d for the gray layer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClmbPpptV54
 
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Marokkaan said:
Great, i hope soon you have some results, good luck.
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Thanks, Marokkaan, for your fullhearted wish:p

Meanwhile… some hints for you.
Are you living in the Earth with its atmosphere rich in oxygen?

Have you ever done such a job like burning an old paint off the steel or other metal with a propane torch?
If yes, you might notice that some particles of the paint sparkle when exposed to the flame, frequently with some time delay. I guess that having microscopic eyes at these moments, you might notice burning of the particles accompanied with some smoke release – similar effects as observed for the Mark Basile red chip.

If you have an electric stove at your home, turn it on and heat it up to the temperatures ca 400 – 500 degrees of C (very deep red/purple color I guess, http://www.bssa.org.uk/topics.php?article=140). (These are the temperatures at which the alleged nanothermite was ignited under air in the Bentham paper under discussion.) When you put particles of some organic matter on the stove (spices, flour, wood dust, etc.) they again quickly burn/sparkle with a release of some tiny smoke.

On the other hand, when performing the same “stove experiment”, let say, on the Moon (without any oxygen available), the same particles would be only heated up to the temperature of the stove and no sparkling/burning would be observed. But, when you put the particles of nanothermite (with a sufficiently low ignition temperature) on that stove, they would ignite even on the Moon.

(In summary: Do you understand our claim that any such experiment performed under air cannot prove thermite?)
 
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Your contributions are extremely valuable, Almond:o)

So you included oxygen in your simulation… Why the peak at ca 0.5 KeV (the overlap of Cr and O signals) is labeled as Cr and not O? (Is there any reason/rule for it?)

So I understand now that it is not easy to determine carbon in such a mixture and at such conditions. Anyway, I would like to add here some basic info about (carbon-based) binder in the Laclede primer. I suppose that its declared content in the paint (71.5 wt%) applies to the dry paint. (It seems to me that there is no reason why this percentage should refer to the wet paint.) Let me do some (very approximate) calculations on its elemental composition.

The main component of epoxy resins is usually an oligomer of Bisphenol A (see Wikipedia, entries “Bisphenol A” and “Epoxy”). Wiki says that the polymerization degree of this oligomeric precursor is in the range from 0 (monomer) to 20 (oligomer with 20 repeating unit). I will take an average value of 10 repeating units for further considerations. Anyway, the elemental composition (wt% of elements) of the repeating Bisphenol A unit with a molecular formula C17H18O3 is:

C 76%, H 7%, O 17%

The common hardener (crosslinking agent) of epoxide resin is triethylene tetramine with a molecular formula C6H18N4. Its elemental composition is:

C 50%, H 12%, N 38%

Theoretically, one amine group of triethylene tetramine can react with one terminal epoxy group of the Bisphenol A oligomer (forming crosslinking site), but this is just a plain theory. For the sake of simplicity, let me suppose that one molecule of this hardener reacts with one molecule of the oligomer with 10 repeating units. Than, hardener adds 10 % of its molar mass to the composition of the forming crosslinked resin.

In this case, the overall sum of the weights of elements is C: 76 + 50/10 = 81 %; H 7 + 12/10 = 8.2 %; O: 17%; N: 38/10 = 3.8 %. The sum now is 110 %. After “normalization” to 100 % I get:

C 73.5 %, H 7.5 %, O 15.5 %, N 3.5%.

Ergh… some input values are so uncertain that all this is just some very rough guess, but still: we can suppose that the hardener does not change the molecular composition of the cured resin dramatically and there is about 70 wt% of carbon and 15 wt% of oxygen in that epoxy binder.

Now, let me put the Oystein's results on the pigment composition here:

O: 40.7%
Fe: 38.5%
Si: 8.9%
Al: 8.6%
Sr: 1,7%
Cr: 1.0%

Pigment constitutes ca 29 % of the dry paint and the weight ratio between the binder and pigment is 71/29 = 2.44. In this ratio, we should add the carbon and oxygen from the binder to the overall composition.
This means that carbon from the binder adds 70 x 2.44 = 171 % to the overall weight.
Oxygen adds another 15 x 2.44 = 37 %. Now, we got the total sum of weight per cent of elements under interest (detectable by XEDS) 100 + 171 + 37 = 308 %.

After “normalization” to 100 % I got this overall composition of the Laclede paint:

C 55 %
O (from the pigment) 13 %
O (from the binder) 12 %
Fe 12.5 %
Si 3 %
Al 2.8 %
Sr 0.5 %
Cr 0.3 %
(The total sum is 99.1 %, reasonable result when taking into account approximate percentage values)

It seems (among other things) that the strontium content in this paint is quite low and it would not be easy to determine it even if its L-peak does not interfere with the Si peak (?)
 
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Almond: (judging from your new interesting simulation) since the ratio between Sr and Si is ca 1:10 in the Laclede paint, the tail visible in the XEDS spectrum of the "Lucky Thirteen" chip can be attributed to the Sr, is this right? But can it serve even as a some kind of proof? (Probably not, I fear::(
 
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Oystein said:
Ivan,

some more ideas what we can do:

The gray layer has so far received no attention in this thread, and very little attention by Harrit e.al.
If we find more information on what the LaClede paint was painted on (type of steel), then maybe we can predict what we'd expect to find, and compare with the data by Harrit, however little that is.
Click to expand...
I did a bit of research on this.

I had a look at the NIST report regarding truss materials - here are extracts relevant to Laclede Steel.

NIST NCSTAR1-3

E1.1 Building Design and Steel Specifications

Building plans and material specifications from the construction era provided a starting point for the study. Thousands of pages of design documents were reviewed. Most valuable were the structural steel design drawings for the WTC towers provided by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In addition, Laclede Steel Company, the fabricator of the floor trusses, provided construction-era documents that showed, amongst other information, that steels with higher strength than specified were used in the floor truss systems. Numerous other sources, including Yawata (now Nippon) Steel documents on perimeter column steel, provided essential insights into the steel fabrication and properties.



E.4 Mechanical Properties

The strength of the steel in the floor trusses was higher than called for in the original specifications. Many of the truss steels that were specified as low strength A 36 were supplied as high-strength, low-alloy steels with much higher strengths. Laclede Steel Company’s substitution of 50 ksi yield strength steel for A 36 in the lower chord of the trusses is expected to have provided significantly improved performance at high temperature.


E.5 Physical Properties

Floor truss rods and chords, manufactured by Laclede Steel Co., met chemistry specifications for ASTM A 242. Contemporaneous construction documents indicated that Laclede Steel Co. routinely upgraded A 36 components to A 242 steel.

A majority of the other structural components (floor truss seats, diagonal bracing straps, gusset plates, core channels, etc.) met chemistry specifications for ASTM A 36 grade steel, which was the default steel when strengths were not specified on the design drawings.
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Here are rough chemical compositions for relevant steels.

ASTM A242

0.15C 1.00Mn 0.15P 0.05S 0.20Cu

ASTM A36

0.29C 0.6-0.9Mn 0.04P 0.05S 0.40Si (Can have Max 0.2Cu too).

Further detail - http://www.russelmetals.com/pdf/english/service/pdf_catalogue/Sec_04_Steel_Plates.pdf

MATERIALS AND EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE

The FEMA team obtained the structural steel examined in this study. The steel from WTC 7 was ASTM A36. The nominal composition of A36 is 0.28% C max, 0.8-1.2% Mn, 0.04% P, 0.05% S, 0.15-0.3% Si balance Fe. The as-fabricated wide flange beam analyzed had a microstructure that consisted of a banded hot worked mixture of ferrite and pearlite as shown in Fig. 1. The structural steel column that was examined was from either WTC 1 or 2 and was known to be a high strength structural steel, and not A36. Since chemistry control for structural steels is generally quite liberal, the exact ASTM designation was not known. The nominal composition of this steel is 0.15% C max, 1.00% Mn max, 0.04% P max, 0.04% S max, 0.2% Cu min with a possible Si addition and residual amounts of gases, such as N and O, and elements (small amounts of these could be deliberate additions, depending upon the grade and steelmaker) such as Cr, Mo, Ti, V, Nb and Zr (with the balance being Fe) similar to an ASTM A242 grade high-strength, low-alloy (HSLA) steel. The as-fabricated column microstructure consisted of a banded hot worked mixture of ferrite and pearlite as shown in Fig. 2. The grain size is somewhat coarser and there is substantially less pearlite than observed in the A36 steel. Also, a fine dispersed phase is observed in the ferrite regions at higher magnification.
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http://www.georgevandervoort.com/fa_lit_papers/World_Trade_Center.pdf

So it would appear that we are looking at ASTM A36 or ASTM A242 - the two are very similar in chemical composition except A242 has half the carbon of A36. I'd be surprised if you could tell them apart with EDX due to natural fluctuations in the steel-making process and different manufacturers.
 
Let me now again summarize an approximate composition of the Laclede primer and compare it to the table on the slide from Mark Basile's lecture (see post #175) :


.......................Laclede primer paint................... "Lucky Thirteen" chip
________________________________________________________________
C...............................55 %........................................72 %
O (from the pigment).....13 %
O (from the binder)........12 %.......................................20 % (total O)
Fe.............................12.5 %.......................................2.2 %
Si............................... .3 %........................................1.5 %
Al...............................2.8 %.......................................1.5 %
Sr...............................0.5 %........................................ -
Cr...............................0.3 %.......................................0.2 %

Taking into account a difference in the carbon content (which is not easy to determine, as explained by Almond), the composition of these two things seems to be roughly similar - except the big difference in the iron content. But this was just a remark, I am just playing somehow with the available data:o)
 
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Ivan Kminek said:
Have you ever done such a job like burning an old paint off the steel or other metal with a propane torch?
Click to expand...

I have done fire watch over welders working on fishing boats. The chip that was ignited by the torch in the first video looked just like the paint chips I have seen hit with a welding torch on the boats. (That they behave like that is part of why we have to do fire watch when somebody is welding.)

If you have an electric stove at your home, turn it on and heat it up to the temperatures ca 400 – 500 degrees of C (very deep red/purple color I guess, http://www.bssa.org.uk/topics.php?article=140). (These are the temperatures at which the alleged nanothermite was ignited under air in the Bentham paper under discussion.) When you put particles of some organic matter on the stove (spices, flour, wood dust, etc.) they again quickly burn/sparkle with a release of some tiny smoke.
Click to expand...

Black pepper works really well. If it is coarse enough, you will also get a distinct "POP" when each grain catches fire.

(In summary: Do you understand our claim that any such experiment performed under air cannot prove thermite?)
Click to expand...
Given what we know about paint under a wleding torch and pepper on a stove, we can say that it sort of disproves thermite. The flamed chip did not burn even as brightly as a cumin seed.
 
bill smith said:
Given that this video is said to be the ignition of a thermitic sample from the WTC dust. would this be an example of purely incendiary nanothermite or the explosive variety ?
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No, it is an example of ********.

It seems to swell and give off some gas when it ignites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-pFbJzTG_E&feature=player_embedded
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Yup. Just like ever kind of paint I have ever seen burn. And, unlike any theoretically possible thermite, it produces no significant light. It leaves a residue.

It's bleedin' paint.
 
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