Moderated Steel structures cannot globally collapse due to gravity alone

So - if a meteorite (smaller than a house) landed at 10,000 kph on a house then action=reaction (F = -F) and all is well? The meteorite's impact is halted? It stops on the roof?

You have a long history of turning serious questions into jokes. This is a serious question and it might test your apparent beliefs. Can you cope with this?

Would the meteorite :

a)stop when it hits the roof?

b)utterly demolish the house and create a large crater where the house used to be?

A serious answer please. No jokes.

Are you serious? Or joking?

Yes, when B contacts A action/reaction forces F/-F develop. B may bounce! Or something may be broken.

A meteorite B impacting a roof A will

a) crush the roof A (reason is F destroys the roof*, -F does not destroy the meteorite)

b) demolish the house below A (reason - see a))

What are you trying to prove. WTC1 was crushed by a meteorite?

* if roof is strong enough to withstand F, it will not be destroyed! Then the meteorite will bounce or get destroyed; it depends on -F! Is the meteorite strong enough to withstand -F, it may bounce.
 
Are you honestly suggesting that one object can be dropped on another and... regardless of what the objects are made of, how they're built, or the height from which it is dropped...the lower object will never, ever collapse? Is that what you are honestly suggesting?

No, pls read my article at http://heiwaco.tripod.com/nist3.htm to find the answer. Topic is steel structures + gravity, etc.

But yes, no collapse occurs ever of lower object. It may be crushed down from top down. But that is not a collapse. Collapse is something else.

And again, topic is what happens to the upper object. According NIST, Bazant, etc, it should remain intact. It is however impossible, if it attempts to crush down the lower object just assisted by gravity.

And that's why the NIST/Bazant theory is nonsense.

I think it is time to lock this thread, moderator.
 
And again, topic is what happens to the upper object. According NIST, Bazant, etc, it should remain intact. It is however impossible, if it attempts to crush down the lower object just assisted by gravity.

And that's why the NIST/Bazant theory is nonsense.
At this point if you do not understand the concept behind setting boundary condition in order to make a simplified model then you're not going to regardless of the experience or background your peers have that are trying to point out your errors. It's been said enough how badly your position reflects on your professional status and any credibility it lends you.
 
Sorry, you are 100% wrong! We have a steel structure of columns/beams which we call parts A + B. B < A height wise. Now we drop B on A. A is fixed on ground. A is the lower part. B is the upper part. Nothing collapses! And B cannot even crush A!

Why is that? Because when B contacs A and applies force F on A, A applies force -F on B. A also apply a force on the ground. Guess what force it can be?

Case 1 - If F only compresses A elastically after a perfect contact/impact, it is likely that -F also only compresses B elastically and the result is that B bounces on A. You agree? Structure is same in A and B.

Case 2 - If F causes local damages to A at the contact areas, -F will also produce equal local damages to B in the contact areas. You agree?

Now you may argue that A also applies a force to the ground and that the ground will apply an equal but opposite force to A and that A should also be damaged at ground level when, hit by B at the other end ... but I will leave it you to find out why it does not happen. Case 1 may help. Ground bounces also.

Reason why in Case 2 local failures occur in interface A/B at contact is that stronger sub-parts damage weaker sub-parts of the two structure parts. The structure crumbles at interface A/B. This does not happen at interface ground/A, as there parts are better aligned. And as A>B, part B will crumble completely before A does the same. Sorry, B cannot crush A.

And nothing collapses!

So the top of the buildings should have bounced off the bottoms and then bounced on down the street?
 
The ratio of weights on the two sides depends on the location of the hinge, the angle of tilt at the time the hinge collapses
The tilt was about 7-8° when the collapsed began and continued to increase to 20-25°. [[FONT=&quot] NCSTAR 1-6 6.2.2 pg 167][/FONT]
In other words, the leading edge [tilt side] was collapsing faster than the trailing edge [hinge side] as would be expected due to the greater weight. As the weight increases on the leading edge, so will the tilt velocity.

the resistance of the two sides is not quite the same, because the strength of the structure is greater for lower storeys, and therefore the leading edge experiences a slightly greater resistance than the trailing edge.
One would expect, then, that the falling mass would continue to rotate, but at a slightly decreasing angular velocity. That's more or less what was in fact observed up to the time it was obscured by dust.
This slight amount a greater resistance would be more than offset by the increasing weight on the leading edge. Any weight outside the perimeter would act as a cantilever with the exterior wall as the fulcrum, thus multiplying the effect of the added weight and crushing the leading edge even faster.
 
C7

Do you think the top should have tilted right off and fallen to one side?
Yes.

Newton's first law says an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an external unbalanced force.

The top section was in motion to the side and down.
Both motions continued as the collapse progressed.
The side motion would continue and the top section would fall off the side of the building unless some external balancing force were applied.
 
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Center of gravity?

Questions?

Aircraft impacted the WTC towers, un-fought fires compromised the structure and the WTC towers fell in a gravity collapse.

911Truth is unable to refute this simple statement with all the 0.001 percent of the world's engineers working for 7 years~! Chris, even the experts closed a thread when you post your tripe at CTBUH. CTBUH could tell by your delusional post you were not able to understand what they said. Try to take it up an order of magnitude and present some evidence instead of hearsay, lies, and fantasy.

Aircraft impacted the WTC towers, un-fought fires compromised the structure and the WTC towers fell in a gravity collapse.
... the chief Structural engineer of the WTC agrees with me.

http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf...ks/CGOZ-58NLCB
… wounded by the impact of the aircraft and bleeding from the fires, both of the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.
 
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Same will happen in your examples: the stronger sub-parts of the 51% section will damage the weaker sub-parts of the 49% section (and vice versa) and soon the weaker sub-parts will get entangled into one another ... and destruction will be arrested. Friction takes care of that.

I see. So then a "progressive collapse" is the construct of a foolish mind not knowing of the frictional retarding force which prevents such an event from transpiring. Foolish structural experts!

Yah, no. Progressive collapse was well defined in building code well before 9/11 for a reason. Your account of what would happen isn't "supported" by the experts because they actually know this. Not that you need to be an expert to know what "progressive" means.
 
What are you trying to prove. WTC1 was crushed by a meteorite?

That the potentially destructive energy of a falling object is a function of its mass and velocity.

Therefore your statement that "dropping a piece of something onto the rest of that something can never cause global collapse" is insupportable nonsense.

But I see you now want the thread closed. So that you never have to admit to your (many) fundamental errors?
 
At this point if you do not understand the concept behind setting boundary condition in order to make a simplified model then you're not going to regardless of the experience or background your peers have that are trying to point out your errors. It's been said enough how badly your position reflects on your professional status and any credibility it lends you.

The boundary conditions are very important doing structural analysis. There you can check the reaction loads on the model, etc, etc, and easily verify if the loadings on the structure are correct.

The boundary conditions of a free falling body are very easy. There are no fixed connections to anything = no reaction loads! The load/force acting on the body just accelerates it.

I am amazed that NIST does structural analysis of a WTC7 upper structure that free falls. How did they do that? http://heiwaco.tripod.com/nist7.htm
 
Yah, no. Progressive collapse was well defined in building code well before 9/11 for a reason. Your account of what would happen isn't "supported" by the experts because they actually know this. Not that you need to be an expert to know what "progressive" means.

Link, please!

Re collapse arrest, it is well defined and studied.
 
That the potentially destructive energy of a falling object is a function of its mass and velocity.

Therefore your statement that "dropping a piece of something onto the rest of that something can never cause global collapse" is insupportable nonsense.

But I see you now want the thread closed. So that you never have to admit to your (many) fundamental errors?

Pls, provide one realistic example of a steel structure where "dropping a piece of something (i.e. a steel structure of certain type) onto the rest of that something (the steel structure of same type) can cause global collapse (of the steel structure)".
 
So the top of the buildings should have bounced off the bottoms and then bounced on down the street?

WTC 1 and 2 top parts should just get stuck on structure below amongst a lot of local failures. They are too weak to bounce up or to crush down the structure below.
 
The previous section was:
Velocity of Air Ejected from the Tower
and the following section is:
Energy Dissipated by Comminution (or Fragmentation and Pulverization)


This seems to be another example of your adjacent=identical fallacy. These are different sections.

They do not offer another mechanism for the "large steel pieces".

Nor do they claim that the large steel sections were ejected by air pressure.

Chris, I've told you how and where to contact the authors and ask them yourself. Until you do so, I have no more time for your idiotic strawmen.

Dave
 
The top section was in motion to the side and down.
Both motions continued as the collapse progressed.
The side motion would continue and the top section would fall off the side of the building unless some external balancing force were applied.

Rubbish. The top section needed to move 208 feet laterally to fall off the side. If the lateral motion was not sufficiently great to allow this to happen within the collapse time, it could not have fallen off the side. The collapse time was of order 12-16 seconds, so the top section would have to have been travelling at more than 17 feet per second to fall off the side. Please post your calculations showing that the lateral component of velocity of the upper block was greater than 17 feet per second, or admit that you are making up arguments without justification.

Dave
 
You are not considering that the weight crushing one side of the tower is about 3 times as much as the other side as this illustration shows.
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/1237/tiltgraphic2fx4.jpg
This much greater weight/force will crush that side faster and the top section will continue to tilt more in that direction.
Chris, I took the time to assemble a website that answers exactly these kinds of questions. Is there any reason that you haven't availed yourself of the wealth of information there?

On page 1 of the engineering section:

Why didn't the towers, or the upper portions of them, topple over?

Why didn't the upper part pivot about it's base? See Bazant & Zhou (2001) Appendix II
Eduardo Kausel (MIT): Why the Towers didn't fall like trees
Frank Greening: An analysis of the tipping of the upper section of WTC 2 (PDF)
A simple graphic explanation of why the top of the south tower didn't fall to the side.
Physicist Dave Rogers on tipping of tower tops.
Structural engineer "Newton's Bit" on "tipping"
 
Gravy:
Is there any reason that you haven't availed yourself of the wealth of information there?

That's simple:

1. He's not interested.
2. He's got his own agenda to push which doesn't allow room for facts.
3. He's living in a fantasy world.
4. He's an idiot.

That about sums it up.

Now, don't be a nasty man and shatter his dreamworld. He may not be able to cope without it.

Bananaman.
 

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