Oh so the problem is money. NIST couldn't afford the simulation for this event? Such a terrible attack on America and NIST doesn't even have the equivalent of one or two Tomahawk missiles to pay for this simulation. Supposing that it really costs that much given present day technology.
Personally I think such a simulation would reveal faults in NIST's report and that is the real cause for the lack of the simulations. The simulation would not fit with what was observed given the initial conditions provided by NIST.
Dear Mr Bean,
Let me explain a little bit about how pointless a simulation would be beyond the initiation event, and why even simulating an initiation event is extremely difficult.
To model WTC7 exactly what happened you would have to recreate what happened.
Starting with the building
- the loading
- as-built strength of steel, bolts , welds, connections etc within the range of possibles
- the distribution of solid objects in the building, that may have deflected or protected individual elements of connections
- the distribution of combustible material
- the built-in construction stresses
- strength of glass walls and brick and dry-wall partitions
- as-built thickness of fire protection in each location
Then when you are modelling the damage you need to consider:
- degree of damage
- additional loading from debris
- effect of oil to emergency generator system and how it was pumped into building
- structural strength of debris pile and how it loaded column, beams and girders.
- damage to fire protection
Then for the fire you need to consider:
-effect of fire fighting
- heating and cooling regimes for every element of steel
- exploding pipes, sealed containers, local collapses of walls, contents, stairs etc, etc
- distribution of fires, both temperature, time, energy and spread ( NIST did a very crude attempt at this, but of course many people have pointed out many other interpretations of what happened and how hot it was )
Then for the collapse you need to consider, all of the above elements in a dynamic sense:
- joints yielding, bolts shearing, joists collapsing, columns buckling
- temperature of all elements and their dynamic properties at these temperatures
- and every millisecond contents, damage, structure and debris, are moving ripping and yielding and coming into violent contact with other elements. While there are systems that can simulate these, the users know that beyond initiation, nothing is reliable.
And then what are we trying to match?
There is no consensus in what elements went first, how much damage there was before the penthouse failed,
How much internal collapse before the perimeter wall failed.
Can you imagine how basic the analysis was, that it didn't even assume that the damaged steel had any load or strength... they just assumed it disappeared. ( of course anything else they did could have been ridiculed ).
Every change has a consequence, so there is an infinite number of scenarios of what could happen. And there are many different assumptions that could lead to a collapse similar to the one observed.
So while the fire-fighters from intuition predicted that the building was going to come down, trying to get an analysis to come within an hour of the failure would be nigh on impossible, since there are an infinite number of variables. To a certain degree you have to start with what happened and see if you can make reasonable assumptions to reflect what happened. I am sure that is what Nist did.
Now modelling with explosives would be even more difficult you would have to get the correct charge time, the charge sizes, how the charges were welded to the columns, the location of the fire protection casing around the explosives, how the charges were effected by fire, the quantity of paint on thermite etc etc.
However if Nist said the collapse came from the failure of Col 179, then I am sure that the demolition could be achieved by blowing up the same column, at one level. Unfortunately our CD theory includes lots of thermite, blowing up the perimeter walls etc. But according to Nist if the people blew up WTC7 that way they would have had to have been very stupid, rather than very smart.
Chris' wishful thinking notwithstanding.[molten aluminum is silvery in daylight]
