Merged "Iron-rich spheres" - scienctific explanation?

Thanks all for your ideas and hints!

@ TruthersLie: The 20 methodological errors in the Harrit-paper - you got a list of them? Do any of them apply to their analysis of iron-rich spheres? The authors claim that they found the Fe:O ratio in the samples after burning to be 2:1 to 4:1, which would roule out that all the Fe is oxidised, and they conclude that some of the Fe must be elemental. Which would also explain their shiny appearance. So, is there anything wrong with their interpretation? Maybe they overlook carbides (FeC)?

@ ElMondoHummus: Yeah, you might be onto something.

@ leftyseargent: No doubt some of the spheres found by RJ Lee come from welding and grinding during initial construction, or even from the foundry. However, I would imagine the total amount to be quite small, and not amount to a high percentage of all the dust; certainly not 6%. I guess we need to do a little number-crunching to verify this shot-from-my-hips guess. HZow much concrete was dustified such that it would be carried outside of GZ boundaries, what percentage of all the steel was chipped off...

@ Sunstealer: Good paper! Wikipedia's "Fly ash" also gives us information about the ubiquity of spheres, and the range of Fe2O3 content in them. However, we would not expect elemental iron there, or would we? Is rust magnetic?

@ Bullwinkle: Yes, iron is ubiquous in buildings, however, I am not merely talking about iron particles, but specifically iron-rich spheres. Spheres form as a product of molten material, so you'd have to explain what melted the "Paper clips, Ball point pins, staples, desks, chairs.belt buckles, blah blah blah". That isn't so easy to do. Typically, office fires don't get hot enough for that.

@ Kent: Hehe, 430°C is indeed the (minimum) ignition temperature for iron dust, and happens to me the same temperature where Harrit's red-and-grey chips started burning :D

@ The Almond: The RJ LeeGroup compared WTC dust with ordinary dust from other offices in NYC away from GZ. The iron-rich spheres were found in both, but much much higher percentage in the GZ dust. This is of course due to the fact that ordinary dust does not mainly form during the disintegration of entire buildings, but mainly through abrasion of surfaces, many of which are organic (skin, hair, clothes, carpets).


So fly ash seems to be the leading contender for the bulk of the spheres, right?
We'd have to veryfy that fly ash was (typically) used for light-weight concrete when the WTC was constructed. And we'd have to take a closer look at what Harrit e.al. found.

And then we have some additional material from welding, the foundry, laser printer and copier toner, and burning of small iron particels, as may have been shipped off during the collapses.
 
Ash

Hi, It might not burn if it all comes down intact into a big pile. But if you first render by collapsing a building and it settles into a debris pile with fires that burn for an extended period. Now if the fires are burning they are getting air and smoke and ash are being released.
All the material anaylzed by RJ Lee was not produced on 9-11-2001 It collected from the event right up to the moment the samples were taken.
What is produced if you grind up a few stables and paperclips and then burn them and then collect the ash particles? Do they require other types of material to adhere to in order to form spheres?
I gather that they are found everywhere but the question is the higher levels in the test area.
 
Oystein said:
So fly ash seems to be the leading contender for the bulk of the spheres, right?
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That's what I'm seeing. Frank Greening's observation is what nails it for me.

Oystein said:
We'd have to veryfy that fly ash was (typically) used for light-weight concrete when the WTC was constructed. And we'd have to take a closer look at what Harrit e.al. found.
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I haven't taken serious shots at verifying this, but what little I've done seems to indicate it was taken for granted. For example, page/slide 5 in the following document is very general and very vague, yet it mentions fly ash being used "since the early '60s":
http://www4.uwm.edu/cbu/Presentations/WS71-Pozza.pdf

... and another article saying much the same thing about concrete manufacturing in the 1970s:
http://www.nrmca.org/research/cif spring 08 fly ash.pdf

The choice to use fly ash in concrete was, if I'm reading the sources on the web correctly, an environmental/pollution sequestration choice. It was thought to be better to use in in concrete than to just let it escape into the air, or to stick it in landfill. Because of this, it sounds like it was rather common, although I do have to warn everybody that I'm merely a layman referring to internet sources for that information; I have no way of knowing how accurate my information is. Regardless, what few sources I've discovered in quick, superficial sources suggests it was common.

And as far as what Harrit and Jones found: Their comments on the oxygenation level are compelling to me; that's why I personally rule out steel cutting during the cleanup as a source for at least the spheres they studied.

Oystein said:
And then we have some additional material from welding, the foundry, laser printer and copier toner, and burning of small iron particels, as may have been shipped off during the collapses.
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That's my opinion. Whether it forms a significant portion of the overall environmental contribution is a whole other question, and one who's answer I don't know at the moment. Regardless, those are also possible contributors. And in many of those cases, known to have been either contained in the towers or be an element/event associated with its construction.
 
In as much as NYC is just about always under construction somewhere, one might expect there to be a higher proportion of iron-rich spheres in normal office dust. How much that is might be useful data in this discussion.

More typical office dust would contain a lot of natural and synthetic fibers, dead skin cells, crumbled leaves of houseplant and potting soil, coffee and dairy products and whatever people track in from the street.

You would be amazing how much pure white dust will form on the top rail of the toilet stalls of a building with a high occupancy, just from the toilet paper that people use. This means that, although there would be iron in the normal dust, the proportions might be different.

Whatever event created or released the iron spheres need not have contributed the entire load of iron. Just think how much toner was released into the building over the previous twenty years or so.

We may be talking about less than 2% of the dust when we discuss iron spheres unique to 9/11.
 
Also from that same paper, are a few interesting tidbits...

1. Large quantities of sulfur containing molecules.
2. VERY LARGE percentage of the dust was CEMENT/CARBON

and this quote, from page 708

The Cortlandt Street sample was mainly composed of con- struction debris [including vermiculite, plas- ter, synthetic foam, glass fragments, paint particles, glass fibers, lead (Figure 3), calcite grains, and paper fragments], quartz grains, low-temperature combustion material (including charred woody fragments), and glass shards.
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TAM:)
 
Another random thought just occurred to me.

The towers may have been, literally, a dust magnet.

I recall reading that large naval vessels need to be deguassed in order to prevent their creating local magnetic anomolies that would interfere with some navigational equiment or activate magnetic mine and torpedo proximity fuses. Would the towers themselves not have created a local magnetic anomoly that would have attracted welding fume from other construction projects in the area and the residue of fireworks and the usual cosmic rain of micrometeorites?

That's an awful lot of iron laid out in straight lines, end-to-end. If it did create any apprerciable magnetic field, I should expect its dust to contain a higher than average load of iron.
 
I found shiny ferromagnetic spherical particles by dragging a cleaned magnet through wood ash from a fire of untreated wood of known origin (yard waste from my own yard).

Wood, like all plant tissue, contains ferritins, iron-bearing protein complexes. The iron in the ferritins is in the chemical form of macromolecules of ferrihydrate (about a thousand iron atoms each). That much is well established in the botanical literature.

It is also well established that wood fires leave behind ferromagnetic traces, a fact which is used in archaeological site surveys.

The steps in between, addressing the questions of the physical and chemical forms of the ferromagnetic residues and how they form in wood fires, do not appear to have been formally studied. I hypothesize that the ferrihydrate in wood, liberated when the proteins burn, condenses exothermically into iron-rich droplets in the hot reducing environment of the flame.

This could happen at well below the melting temperature of iron, and without any mechanical agitation, because the melting of bulk iron and the mechanical division of bulk melted iron into droplets are not involved in the process. The process is the condensation of already separate iron macromolecules into larger droplets.

This would also explain where the iron-rich microspheres in coal ash (fly ash) come from. (And I believe some explanation of that is needed, since unburned coal does not contain iron spheres and coal is not burned at temperatures at or above the melting point of bulk iron.)

Ferritins in wood would also end up in paper made from that wood. I believe there's sufficient evidence to say that quantities of wood and paper burned in the pre-collapse fires.

I could be completely wrong about exactly how the spheres form, but if you make an ordinary wood fire in a clean vessel and stir the ashes with a strong magnet afterward, I predict you'll find some. No thermite necessary.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
Oystein said:
Hello to the more able among you! This goes out to those who already know what I am talking about by just reading the title of this thread:

What about them "iron-rich micro-spheres in the dust of WTC"?



You know: Jones, Harrit e.al. say that they found iron-rich micro-spheres after incinerating their famous red-grey chips.
J.R.Lee group found that about 6% of the dust found inside a building right next door to GZ was made up of iron, mostly in the form of tiny spheres.

I understand that micro-spheres form when the material cools from liquid to solid. So to me, the layman, it appears reasonable to say that iron-rich micro-spheres had a temperature above their melting point just before they formed. Jones and other truthers interprete this as evidence that fires must have burned that heated (macroscopic amounts of) steel above the melting point of steel - which most of us would consider highly unlikely from uncontrolled hydrocarbon fires.

I understand that such microspheres were certainly formed during clean-up, when steel was cut with blow-torches and mechanically. But I doubt that this process would deposit large amounts of such spheres to locations away from GZ.

It seems to me that most of these spheres must either have formed during the fires, or been present even before 9/11 and released during the collapses.

My questions thus are:
  • What do we know about this already?
  • Can ironspheres form during "normal" fires, and if so, how?
  • Did Jones and Harrit really find ironspheres, and did they really form when they burned their chips?
  • How many such spheres are already contained in building materials, such as concrete?
Click to expand...

Here's what made the microspheres.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6h5sQqN_x8
 
Myriad said:
I could be completely wrong about exactly how the spheres form, but if you make an ordinary wood fire in a clean vessel and stir the ashes with a strong magnet afterward, I predict you'll find some. No thermite necessary.

Respectfully,
Myriad
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Do you suspect the iron constituents to be elemental, rather than oxides?
 
Have a look at what fellow "inside job" believer, Frederic Henry-Couannier had to say when he was given some samples from the same dust Jones used...

http://www.darksideofgravity.com/marseille_gb.pdf

From his section on "Problems with the nanothermite hypothesis"

40 nm Al nanoparticules oxydize very fast in the open air! It is impossible for the chips to keep reactive 7 years after 9/11 if these particules were not efficiently protected by an appropriate coating. And even in this case the reactivity of chips tested by the authors after 7 years is very questionnable. http://www.darksideofgravity.com/Aging.pdf

I could not confirm a reaction producing molten iron. I was told that my red-red chips may have already reacted on 11/9, or be deactivated by heat, humidity and oxygen of the air ( natural aging). But if my chips are the same as those S.Jones &co discovered and studied in the dust, shouldnt mine have remained reactive as long as their owns (but K Ryan also confirmed the presence of red-red inactive chips in his samples)? Indeed in their initial publication, S Jones and co clearly state that all their chips reacted when heated producing molten iron and dont even mention the existence of red-red chips.

My critical way of analysing the nanothermite hypothesis and suggesting other ways resulted as far as I'm concerned in a genuine total embargo on WTC dust (I asked for other samples since other independent searchers willing to confirm my vs Jones results in Europe would need this material). This behaviour is unthinkable specially for searchers of the 11/9 truth.
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and this is from a guy who believes in the whole inside job crap.

TAM:)
 
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RedIbis said:
Do you suspect the iron constituents to be elemental, rather than oxides?
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Generally no, but I suspect that will vary depending on the specific flame conditions.

Ferrihydrite (typically 5Fe2O3.9H2O) is metastable and will spontaneously transform into hematite Fe2O3 if removed from the aqueous environment or ferritin protein structure in which it forms. So getting as far as hematite in a flame is a pretty safe bet.

The question is, how much further reduction we can expect to occur. Getting to magnetite (FeO.Fe2O3) is a very likely step, and one that would better account for magnetic signatures of fires. (The iron-rich spheres in coal ash and coal smoke are primarily magnetite.) In addition, the spheres I find are more strongly attracted to a magnet than I would expect for hematite, but consistently with magnetite.

But elemental iron? Maybe some, in a sufficiently fuel-rich ("oxygen starved") flame generating plenty of CO as a reducing agent — basically the same chemical reaction FeO + CO -> Fe + CO2 used in early iron smelting (in which the iron is not melted). This would be an undesirable operating condition for a coal burner, but could easily happen in portions of a passively drafted fireplace fire and even more likely in structure fires.

Magnetite, hematite, and elemental iron can all take on a shiny metallic appearance so the external appearance of the spheres isn't much help in making these distinctions.

By the way: I misspelled ferrihydrite as ferrihydrate in my previous post. Of course in chemistry such distinctions matter, so I regret the error.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
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Thanks again! I have a lot of reading to do, following your suggestions!

@ T.A.M.: Paul J. Loiy had a large Fe-signal, but doesn't quantify or qualify it. It's not something his study was interested in, and of course he expected large quantities.
I wasn't aware of Frederic Henry-Couannier analysis yet, so thanks a lot for that!

@ lefty: Dust magnet? Sounds bizarre... Would the towers not be in competition with all the other buildings around? I suppose most contain lots of iron and can be magnetized...

@ Myriad: This condensation process you describe is something I have privately imagined before, so I am happy someone else describes it! :) Also, the shiny appearance of Fe-oxides and their magnetic properties is news to me. Thanks! As for the details of chemical reactions - great to have that, but I am not competent enough to say much on it yet. That's where I have some reading to do!

@ DGM: I believe it is best to put Bill on ignore and not respond to him ;)

@ RedIbis: I am not sure any researcher found and analysed significant amounts of elemental iron in WTC microspheres. Harrit e.al. assume that some elemental Fe must have been present in their spheres, but they only estimated the ratio Fe:O in a sample that contained a mix of compounds. C was also present, but excluded from analysis for methodological reasons (they had prepared the sample with a thin layer of C), so it is not possible to distinguish between pure Fe and Fe-carbides, for example. Do you know of any more conclusive studies that show elemental Fe in spheres?
 
Oystein said:
@ lefty: Dust magnet? Sounds bizarre... Would the towers not be in competition with all the other buildings around? I suppose most contain lots of iron and can be magnetized...
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The towers contained a lot more steel than most of the surrounding buildings and were not inches deep in a concrete or masonry sheath. They also stuck up higher in the air where they could grab more of the dust from fireworks. (They do stage some bodacious fireworks dispaly in NYC at times.) There is the aluminum to consider, I admit, and I knoew that aluminum repels a magnet. Not sure whether it shields a magnet, though.

At any rate, we do need to know more about the background levels of iron in typical dust in NYC to determine just how large an increase in iron content we need to account for here. We need not figure out where the entire 6% of the dust that was iron came from.
 
Oystein,

Frederic Henry-Couannier, is a JREF member that goes by "henryco".

I warn you now though, he seems like a somewhat honest scientist, but he is full on truther. His explanation for the lack of "thermitic grey/red chips" in his samples, was that the FBi or other secret agency got to the samples at the post office, and took out the real chips, and replaced them with the red-red ones.

You've been warned.

TAM:)
 
leftysergeant said:
The towers contained a lot more steel than most of the surrounding buildings and were not inches deep in a concrete or masonry sheath. They also stuck up higher in the air where they could grab more of the dust from fireworks. (They do stage some bodacious fireworks dispaly in NYC at times.) There is the aluminum to consider, I admit, and I knoew that aluminum repels a magnet. Not sure whether it shields a magnet, though.

At any rate, we do need to know more about the background levels of iron in typical dust in NYC to determine just how large an increase in iron content we need to account for here. We need not figure out where the entire 6% of the dust that was iron came from.
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The 6% is a figure for dust at a specific location, namely inside the offices of 130 Liberty Street which had most of its windows blown out), across the street from GZ. Dust has a way of seperating and sorting itself, depending on distance travelled, air movement and such things. Generally, the denser and larger parts travel less far before settling than the lighter and smaller particles. I would expect to find much less iron-rich particles even only one block farther away from GZ.
 
T.A.M. said:
Oystein,

Frederic Henry-Couannier, is a JREF member that goes by "henryco".

I warn you now though, he seems like a somewhat honest scientist, but he is full on truther. His explanation for the lack of "thermitic grey/red chips" in his samples, was that the FBi or other secret agency got to the samples at the post office, and took out the real chips, and replaced them with the red-red ones.

You've been warned.

TAM:)
Click to expand...

I am warned :)

I have full confidence that truthers can do honest and valid research. In the end, we have to evaluate their arguments, not their overall position on things.

Some "truthers" disagree with one another on analytical details, but so do some "debunkers". For example, in this very thread, Myriad argues that combustions of organic materials, for example paper, would create a significant supply of iron-rich spheres; ElMondoHummus, on the other hand, doubts that they are a byproduct of the fires.
 
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