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Total Building Collapse from a Single Column Failure

Trevor, your bluster is incredible and despicable, especially in light of the fact that the image you show is not the same as the fin connection between the girder and beams.

In the case of girder A2001, the fin plates were welded to the underside of the girder top flange and the web with 5/16" fillet welds on both sides of the 4" top and 1/4" fillet welds on both sides along the 20" length. See the attachment here. It could clearly resist moments because it could react forces applied over an arm.

Your appeal to the AISC is misplaced and not accurate here. If the girder started rotating the upper weld on the fin plate would stop it. The girder's small moment if the web was past the seat would not generate anywhere near enough force to fail ten 1/4" x 4" long fillet welds in shear and then peel the ten 20" long 5/16" fillet welds on the web.

Please show the vectors of forces applied to the fillet welds, and then what strength they have to resist in that direction. Per Newtons Bit's post, incorporate experimental results in the analysis, not just academic calculations.
 
Please show the vectors of forces applied to the fillet welds, and then what strength they have to resist in that direction. Per Newtons Bit's post, incorporate experimental results in the analysis, not just academic calculations.

The fillet welds are actually reasonable strong for moments in the axis that Tony Szamboti is talking about. However in the out-of-plane direction, such as what would be placed on them as the girder rotates due to uneven axial pushing from the beams is another matter.
 
Hilarious.

Fire and damage is the only physically possible way for that building to come down. All this insanity (and it IS insanity) about bolts and girders and stiffeners is just horsecrap. All truthers fail miserably, regardless of what their perceived expertise is.
 
Hilarious.

Fire and damage is the only physically possible way for that building to come down. All this insanity (and it IS insanity) about bolts and girders and stiffeners is just horsecrap. All truthers fail miserably, regardless of what their perceived expertise is.
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You have nerve questioning my intellectual honesty.


HE may question your intellectual (dis)honesty......after this exchange most hove no doubt about it....

The 53 foot long beams to the east of girder A2001 would buckle at approximately 8,000 lbs of axial force when they were at 600 degrees C. The six 7/8" diameter ASTM A325 bolts in their connection to the girder would require about 18,000 lbs. each to shear at 600 degrees C. That is 108,000 lbs. to break the bolts at 600 degrees C and 8,000 lbs. to buckle the beam.

However, since there were no shear studs on girder A2001 neither failure mode would have occurred since their was no reaction force applied to the expanding beam.

I have explained this several times on this forum.

And once again you are wrong....

"Connection damage was typically gradual, with bolts and/or welds failing sequentially over time."

(pg 490 NIST NCSTAR 1-9)

Do you believe in magic?
 
err...no...it's not. The "Pepper Letter" thread is locked for purging all the off topic technical stuff. So better not start discussing Pepper here or you risk punishment - possibly flogging by the... err.. lash....l :D

Oh bother!

Yes, I first went to that thread and when I saw it locked came here, then, in a possible "senior's moment" forgot I had switched threads.
<<hangs head>>
 
HE may question your intellectual (dis)honesty......after this exchange most hove no doubt about it....

I don't think that was the point where most people decided on the honesty of his arguments. That conclusion happened years ago. Do you remember the missing jolt nonsense?
 
If you would read the research, you would find that the claim of "it would clearly resist moments" has been disproved by laboratory experiments. You keep ignoring this simple fact, and it is dishonest.

The fulcrum would be the edge of the bearing seat. The load on the girder would be about 130 kips. So if the center of the web was 1" past the seat that would be 130,000 in-lbs. The top of the fin connection would need to react this over an arm of about 30 inches and thus need to be able to withstand 130,000/30 = 4,333 lbs.

The 5/16" welds at the top of the fin plate were actually 3.75" long and of course the weld throat of .707 x 5/16" would be used. The weld material was E70 with a tensile strength of 70,000 psi. The weld stress area of one weld on one side at the top would be .3125 in. x .707 x 3.75 in. = .828 in^2. The force required to fail the weld would be 57,960 lbs.

The factor of safety against what you are saying with just one weld on one side of the fin plate is 57,960/4,333 = 13.3, and there are two of those welds on each beam connection and ten altogether with the five beams.

If you want to derate by 50% due to temperature it is still better than a 6.5 to 1 FoS for just one weld.

I would say your theory of girder roll off and claim that the fin plates could not handle moments have no merit.
 
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I don't think that was the point where most people decided on the honesty of his arguments. That conclusion happened years ago. Do you remember the missing jolt nonsense?
He employs two basic falsehoods - it is hard to say whether it is deliberate mendacity or simply a lack of understanding of the engineering. They are:
1) He starts his arguments from false premises selected to support his pre-determined conclusion THEN pads it out with detailed engineering which, whether valid or not, does not prove his case due to the false starting assumptions; AND
2) He approaches the "collapse initiation" stage of WTC1 & 2 collapse from a wrongly applied Bazantian (B & Z) one dimensional perspective when the event is essentially 3D and cannot be explained in 1D.

So the big errors in "Missing Jolt" were (1) 1D not 3D reasoning - he misused the B&Z limit case as if it was what really happened AND (2) his assumed starting point was already AFTER the time when any jolt would appear. So he went looking for a future event when it was already past history.

AND you have to correct BOTH those errors to get to the proper understanding. Then all his claims about "tilt not preventing axial alignment of columns" fail for the same reasons. By the time you have tilt the column ends have already missed. He is not alone on misunderstanding that version of "Missing Jolt revisited". :o ;)

I identified his "wrong starting assumptions" error in my very first post on the internet with this comment:
Me - elsewhere 14 Nov 2007 said:
...The paper referenced as Engineering Reality by Tony Szamboti is typical of many which look impressive in detail to the non-engineer. The complex calculations may even be correct but the base premises are faulty and the resulting conclusions can readily be demonstrated to be totally wrong.
 
The fillet welds are actually reasonable strong for moments in the axis that Tony Szamboti is talking about. However in the out-of-plane direction, such as what would be placed on them as the girder rotates due to uneven axial pushing from the beams is another matter.

The 45 foot long girder would expand by 4.125 inches at 500 degrees C. The beams would then have to deflect that amount and the lateral force applied to the fin connection would be equal to the force required to deflect a cantilever.

The beams were 53 feet long and heated to 600 degrees C where the modulus of elasticity (MOE) would be 11,310,000 psi per the AISC. The moment of inertia (MOI) of the W24 x 55 in its weak axis is 29.1 in.^4.

The cantilever deflection equation is

deflection = (force x length^3) / (3 x MOE x MOI)

force = (deflection x 3 x MOE x MOI) / (length^3)

so

force = (4.125 x 3 x 11,310,000 x 29.1) / (636^3) = 15.83 lbs.

Now if we apply the 16 lbs. over the two 1/4" x 19.5" long fillets on the sides of the fin plate we would have a stress of something like 2 psi.

There will hardly be a failure of the fin connection that way either. It looks like your roll off theory was just a fancy thought because in reality it is a serious non-starter.
 
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The paper before that was worse. He's been squaring up the collapse into perfect alignment for years. ;)
Yes. It comes from the same errors of wrong starting assumptions leading into false reasoning. By the time you have tilt the column ends have already missed.

The latest paper got a few bits right - and pulled the rug from under "Missing Jolt".
 
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I don't think that was the point where most people decided on the honesty of his arguments. That conclusion happened years ago. Do you remember the missing jolt nonsense?

I posted about that and included the section of the video from Hardfire about it. Tony claims the building fell initially when the thermate/mite/nano/explosives/WTF cut columns and fell then a jolt occured as it slammed into lower floors and THEN it tilted thus trying to claim the tilt was not apart of the collapse sequence initiation.

http://youtu.be/kDvDND9zNUk?t=8m18s

Well I uploaded two videos to my channel that shows this claim to be utter ********.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ycywl1dUZ4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td7bvj9ddJw

I know this isn't the right thread but I sure would like to hear Tony respond.
 
Most of what I am seeing here from those still trying to defend the impossible NIST girder walk-off theory is equivalent to

blah, blah, blah, blah blahbity blah, blah, blah, blah.

No real calculations or anything of substance, just proclamations, unsupported assertions, and ad hominems against those they disagree with.

It is quite incredible to watch.
 
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Most of what I am seeing here from those still trying to defend the impossible NIST girder walk-off theory is equivalent to

blah, blah, blah, blah blahbity blah, blah, blah, blah.

No real calculations or anything of substance, just proclamations, unsupported assertions, and ad hominems against those they disagree with.

It is quite incredible to watch.

Too funny.

So how'd the explosives get in there?

What you call "blah blah blah" is in reality your arguments falling faster than free fall speed. It only looks like 'blah blah blah' to you because you don't feel the need to acknowledge the physical impossibility of the asinine theory of controlled demolition.
 
The fulcrum would be the edge of the bearing seat. The load on the girder would be about 130 kips. So if the center of the web was 1" past the seat that would be 130,000 in-lbs. The top of the fin connection would need to react this over an arm of about 30 inches and thus need to be able to withstand 130,000/30 = 4,333 lbs.

The 5/16" welds at the top of the fin plate were actually 3.75" long and of course the weld throat of .707 x 5/16" would be used. The weld material was E70 with a tensile strength of 70,000 psi. The weld stress area of one weld on one side at the top would be .3125 in. x .707 x 3.75 in. = .828 in^2. The force required to fail the weld would be 57,960 lbs.

The factor of safety against what you are saying with just one weld on one side of the fin plate is 57,960/4,333 = 13.3, and there are two of those welds on each beam connection and ten altogether with the five beams.

If you want to derate by 50% due to temperature it is still better than a 6.5 to 1 FoS for just one weld.

I would say your theory of girder roll off and claim that the fin plates could not handle moments have no merit.

You keep providing calculations for something that actual laboratory experiments referenced by AISC have shown doesn't happen in reality.
 
Most of what I am seeing here from those still trying to defend the impossible NIST girder walk-off theory is equivalent to

blah, blah, blah, blah blahbity blah, blah, blah, blah.

No real calculations or anything of substance, just proclamations, unsupported assertions, and ad hominems against those they disagree with.

It is quite incredible to watch.

Are you willing to address this post of mine?


In particular I wish you to address the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ycywl1dUZ4 as it pertains to your "jolt" claims.

Also look at the amount of lateral movement from this angle!

http://youtu.be/Td7bvj9ddJw?t=1m20s

Tony can you please point out the jolt.

Also, if you look at the video closely and use the building to the left in frame as a reference against the WTC vertical columns you can actually see the bowing INCREASE during the duration of the video. I can also see dynamic forces on the right side of the WTC in frame IE I personally think the floors internally at that impact point DO PANCAKE first before the outer bowing gives way.

I think NIST was WRONG about the pancake initiation theory if you look closely at that video in the time domain focusing to the right of the building seconds before bowing/outer column failure.

BTW even if NIST is wrong about aspects of the collapse dynamics this doesn't mean in any way whatsoever that the conspiracy is true or that this potential reality supports the claims of a conspiracy.
 
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