Rebuttal Gage Part Seven
Part Seven: Iron Microspheres and Sulfidized Steel,
Can you guys take all this verbiage? Here's Part Seven. It was one of the tougher parts for me to prepare. Many of you will recognize yourselves in what I've said. Do let me know of there are any inaccuracies. Thanks as always.
Chris Mohr
Face: This is the seventh part of my exploration of Richard Gage’s claims for controlled demolition on 911 in his video Blueprint for Truth. So far, we have looked at the physics of the collapse of the Twin Towers. Now we will shift to two claims which involve the chemistry of the collapse: The iron microspheres and the suflidized steel in the debris. I got a lot of direct help from chemists, metallurgists, and 911 researcher and engineer Ryan Mackey in understanding Richard Gage’s claims in these matters.
11 Iron Microspheres
3.) Near the beginning of my March 6, 2011 debate, Richard Gage said I had to explain “The billions of previously molten iron microspheres or the debate is over.”
Richard Gage asserts that iron microspheres can be created only at temperatures over 2700 degrees, way more heat than an office fire. He sees it as evidence of very hot nanothermites detroying the structural supports of the Twin Towers. Let’s look at the claim that only controlled demolition can explain these iron microspheres and see if it is true.
The RJ Lee Dust Study of 2003 prepared for Deutsche Bank reported billions of iron-rich spheres, not pure iron spheres as Richard Gage claims. The melting temperature of a sphere with iron and other metals mixed together is lower than pure iron.
In our debate, Gage asserted that with the microspheres, “If you had thousands of cutter charges throughout the columns and beams in the buildings, under explosive conditions, that would be dispersed.” That’s a big if. Would these cutter charges be carved into the steel structures, because if so, that would create the stench of burning metal and incredibly loud noises. If not, they would be less precise in doing their work. Either way, cutter charges leave behind several unmistakable, tell-tale signatures, none of which are seen in any sample from Ground Zero:
Steel fractures showing extremely high rate-of-strain, which is positively detectable through crystallography
Significant deposits of copper on and around the cut surfaces
Infusion of copper into the steel grain structure
Abundant steel shrapnel, also with a unique strain signature, both embedded elsewhere in the structure and detectable in the dust
PICTUREs OF weldder, A more likely source goes back to the 1970s, when workers welded thousands of steel beams and splattered microspheres everywhere.
Slide of Reasons Even if they were created on 911, the RJ Lee study said, “Considering the high temperatures reached during the destruction of the WTC... Iron - rich spheres... would be expected to be present in the Dust.” Why would they say this if they did not know that iron-rich spheres could be created in a regular office fire?
SLIDE IRON MICROSPHERE IN FLY ASH Another possible source of iron-rich microspheres is fly ash in concrete. At the time of our debate I could not find proof of this assertion, but here it is. This is a photo and accompanying spectrum of an iron-rich microsphere in Tolk fly ash I obtained from a dust expert who has collected 400,000 dust samples from fly ash alone. This particle is an iron oxide of some type, but the particle also contains small amounts of calcium, silicon and aluminum.
Face: Since we're dealing with iron oxides, iron hydroxides, and iron eutectics, the assumption that "iron rich" spheres must come from fire temperatures capable of melting pure iron is invalid.
In conclusion, if the iron-rich spheres had been created by controlled demolition, there would have been telltale signs in the steel girders that were never found. And there are several other possible explanations for their appearance in the rubble that are consistent with the physical evidence.
12 Sulfidized Steel
Face: Let’s look next at the sulfidized steel found in th debris. Richard Gage cites Jonathan Barnett in FEMA’s APPendix C from late 2001. Richard Gage says he “Found sulfidization and intergraular melting.” This, he believes can come only from thermate, which is thermite plus sulfur. Thermate is quieter and less explosive than nanothermite, so he believes it may have been used in the implosive collapse of Building 7, which we will soon discuss at length. Let’s try to understand what sulfidized steel is, what Appendix C actually says, and if Richard Gage’s assertion about it is true.
Sulfidized steel is a eutectic mixture of steel and sulfur, where sulfur invades the boundaries of the steel onb a granular level. The mixture is "eutectic" because the ingredients mutually impede crystal formation. Once the lowest melting temperature is reached, the entire mixture may be treated as liquid. Think of water ice well mixed with frozen alcohol -- once you melt the alcohol, the entire thing is a slurry; you do not have to reach the melting temperature of ice. The melting point of steel is over 2700 degrees, but the melting point of eutectic sulfidized steel is 1740 degrees, well within the temperature range of an office fire.
Sulfidizing of steel doesn’t happen easily. It can happen if thermate is used to melt steel, and you can see thermate doing just that by looking on YouTube, where thermate takes seven or eight seconds to melt through a steel beam. How such a slow process can be used to pull off a precise and instantaneous controlled demolition is a problematic question for Richard Gage.
Another big problem for Richard is that there is so little sulfidized steel in the debris. One piece wasa horizontal beam from the 53rd floor of one of the towers and was not considered relevant for NIST’s collapse study since the collapse began many stories higher. Another piece may have come from somewhere in Building 7. That’s about it. The few examples were all horizontal beams, not columns. This can’t explain a global collapse. And if you think it was all shipped away so we couldn’t see that it was everywhere, 911 firefighter Vincent Palmieri testified to me personally that “I saw many steel girders with burn marks on them, girders bent in the fires... I understand that there were a few steel pieces that were corroded by sulfur, but in the massive debris piles I worked on I never saw a single example of sulfidized steel.” Not one, out of hundreds of thousands of columns and beams in the debris!
http://www.me.wpi.edu/MTE/People/imsm.html
The “Intergranular melting” FEMA talks about is nothing like melting as we know it. The steel was not rendered molten. The component that had the lowest melting point became part of the "slag". The technical terms for the sequence of what happened was intergranular melting, high temperature corrosion via sulphidation, oxidation, and decarburisation leading to a liquid Iron Oxide Suflur mix from grain boundary melting in a very, very small quantity, around 20 microns wide. It is a slow, microscopic process during which no bit of the steel became molten in the sense of dripping liquid. Instead, the steel just wears off grain by grain. This happened over a period of at least 8 days. Corrosion of beams can continue in the weeks following the collapse in the hot debris pile, once it is started, as stated in the FEMA Appendix C. High-temperature eutectic corrosion simply cannot be used as evidence for molten steel. It is not. Non-metallurguists will likely misconstrue this intergranular melting as "whooo, steel got hot and melted away like ice in the sunshine".
Reason # The chemical microstructures formed by the sulfidation would not have survived the 4500 degree temperatures thermite reacts at. A thermite reaction would've obliterated those structures. The presence of those microstructures along the edges of the corroded areas actually disprove the use of thermate because they would have been obliterated by the thermitic reaction. If these pieces of sulfidized steel were created with thermates, then we would have also seen a lot of aluminum oxide, which we don’t see. Those who assert that the white smoke visible in the fires was the aluminum boiling off may not realize that the boiling point of aluminum oxide is 5,390 degreees F. That's 1000 degrees above the hottest temperatures of thermate. Not only is there no aluminum oxide and no way to account for its absence, there is no Sulphur in the Harrit/Jones/Ryan et al paper. It's not there - therefore no thermate.
The 911 mystery is how the steel became sulfidized in the first place, and no one knows with certainty. As I’ve shown, it is not a mystery that is solved by positing thermates.
Metallurgist Jonathan Barnett, professor at the Center for Fire Safety Studies in Worcester, Massachusetts discovered the sulfidized steel. He wrote in FEMA’s Appendix C, “The severe corrosion and erosion of Samples 1 and 2 are a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified. The rate of corrosion is also unknown. A detailed study into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed .”
In a personal email, Jonathan Barnett wrote,
"The Possible sources of enough sulfur:
-Heating oil (extr high probability)
-Construction materials such as gyp wallboard dust (extr high probability)
-environmental sources such as acid rain (high)"
Barnett is fully aware that the findings are corrosion due to sulfidation attack. He helped determine that in the Barnett, Biederman, and Sisson reports: None of these 3 authors believe thermate was a likely source. Sisson was quoted on BBC in 2008, saying "I don't find it very mysterious at all, that if I have steel in this sort of a high temperature atmosphere that's rich in oxygen and sulphur this would be the kind of result I would expect."
[SLUFIDATION FROM GYPSUM AFTER ALL: How created? ***
http://www.cswdc.co.uk/emissions-data.html?id=35 CSWDC Waste Management Company Website]
Barnett’s claim that gypsum wallboard near the steel could have provided the sulfur seemed to contradict that fact that gypsum is relatively inert chemically, which is why it is used as a fire shield around structural steel. But recently I read the CS WDC Waste Management website, which explains certain environmental hazards. They wrote,
“How is Sulphur Dioxide formed?
“Sulphur is present in the waste stream from batteries, plastics, waste oil, and gypsum-filled wallboard. It is released into the combustion gases during incineration and reacts with the oxygen in the air to produce sulphur dioxide.”
We know that Sulphur Dioxide was at ground zero at dangerously high levels, so I now agree that gypsum wallboard burned at high temperatures could indeed have created sulfur dioxide in high concentrations, which in turn could have begun the sulfidation process of the steel.
Other scientists have proposed Fluorine gas from Halon type fire extinguishers or Freon from A/C’s creating Fluorosulfuric acid (HFSO3) is a superacid, about a thousand times stronger than sulfuric acid , which might explain the rarity and severity of the corrosion.
In our March 6 debate, Richard Gage claimed, : "NIST chose to ignore or obfuscate the sulfidized steel." Well, I took a lot of time to learn about this and explain it. The bottom line is that I just can’t see any way that a few pieces of sulfidized steel beams could have had anything to do with the collapse one way or another. NISTdidn’t ignore it; they mentioned it expressly in NCSTAR1-3C, along with new geometric analysis that further demonstrates the sulfidization occurred post-collapse, and is therefore irrelevant for their study of what caused the collapses. FEMA had already referred the sulfidized steel question to WPI for further study. NIST felt they had no more reason to investigate the sulfidized steel than they had to do an extensive study on the air pressure of the car tires in the garage; it was too rare a phenomenon to be a causative factor in the collapses.
Conclusion:
I was impressed at first with the arguments around sulfidized steel and the iron microspheres. Two years ago, I was impressed with some of Richard’s arguments around the physics of the collapse. But at this moment, there is only one scientific assertion in the 911 Truth movement which still has the potential to change my mind, and that is the 2008 experiment purporting to prove that unexploded thermitic material was found in the World Trade Center dust. That’s what we’ll be talking about next.
Strong evidence will be needed to convince me, and as of June 2011, I feel that the results remain inconclusive at best. In the meantime, from a purely scientific point of view, I feel that the call for yet another 911 investigation can’t succeed until some much stronger evidence is put forth. The overwhelming consensus among scientists and structural engineers favors natural collapse. I do not wish to see scientific consensus overridden by a political investigation. Creationists with a strong religious base, and global warming deniers with powerful economic interests, are having success in doing end runs around scientific consensus with intense political maneuvering. As you will see, I support more thermitic dust experiments to attempt to change the scientific consensus around the controlled demolition theory first. If that happens, then an investigation will be inevitable.
So far, the science behind the controlled demolition theory has not impressed me. The only reasons I can think of for another 911 investigation are political in nature, and we will return to that question at the end of this video.