Yet another stupid response from Heiwa He loves having his name in bold, doesn't he? Here you go Heiwa.. perhaps you understand it now... because its so easy to come up with a whole bunch of structures that meet your challenge.
Anyway here is an example of how total collapse can be generated by less than 1/20th of the total weight of a structure:
1. Get 20 Pizza boxes and stack on top of each other.
2. Tape together the sides with a few vertical lines of scotch tape.
3. cut each side vertically into 4, starting at each corner. Add vertical tape to stick the columns together
4. cut out all horizontal cardboard (the floors), and then replace them sticking them back in position with tiny amounts of glue, that is only just able to support the self weight of 1 piece of cardboard.
5. drop the top horizontal piece.
So what happens.
1. the top piece falls and hits the next piece.
2. and because the glue is only strong enough to support one piece of cardboard the next piece falls...
3 and so on, until all the horizontals have fallen
4. at some point during the collapse the outside of the box falls down. The columns will become unstable because they have lost the lateral restraint of the floor thro the glue. The columns will not be able to support their own weight as a single skin of cardboard 20 pizza-boxes tall. The columns will tend to fall outwards because the air is being pushed out of the boxes by the collapse.
Interestingly, the floors will collapse at essentially free-fall speed as they pancake, because the glue offers no real resistance and is massively overloaded, even after the first impact (200% of design load plus impact force to bring it to about 300% of design). The columns will be slower to fall, and will tend to fall radially out from the middle.
Now I am sure Heiwa will say that I am cheating, but not according to "Heiwa's Challenge" . And, of course, this type of failure works even better in steel, although Heiwa did suggest Pizza boxes. The "heiwa challenge" was to cause collapse by using a tiny proportion of the total mass, which this does quite nicely.
Don't ya just love pizza!! If by some miracle Heiwa concedes, then pls donate my winnings to a charity that supports the victims of the Iraq war; both the servicemen and the civilians
Anyway here is an example of how total collapse can be generated by less than 1/20th of the total weight of a structure:
1. Get 20 Pizza boxes and stack on top of each other.
2. Tape together the sides with a few vertical lines of scotch tape.
3. cut each side vertically into 4, starting at each corner. Add vertical tape to stick the columns together
4. cut out all horizontal cardboard (the floors), and then replace them sticking them back in position with tiny amounts of glue, that is only just able to support the self weight of 1 piece of cardboard.
5. drop the top horizontal piece.
So what happens.
1. the top piece falls and hits the next piece.
2. and because the glue is only strong enough to support one piece of cardboard the next piece falls...
3 and so on, until all the horizontals have fallen
4. at some point during the collapse the outside of the box falls down. The columns will become unstable because they have lost the lateral restraint of the floor thro the glue. The columns will not be able to support their own weight as a single skin of cardboard 20 pizza-boxes tall. The columns will tend to fall outwards because the air is being pushed out of the boxes by the collapse.
Interestingly, the floors will collapse at essentially free-fall speed as they pancake, because the glue offers no real resistance and is massively overloaded, even after the first impact (200% of design load plus impact force to bring it to about 300% of design). The columns will be slower to fall, and will tend to fall radially out from the middle.
Now I am sure Heiwa will say that I am cheating, but not according to "Heiwa's Challenge" . And, of course, this type of failure works even better in steel, although Heiwa did suggest Pizza boxes. The "heiwa challenge" was to cause collapse by using a tiny proportion of the total mass, which this does quite nicely.
Don't ya just love pizza!! If by some miracle Heiwa concedes, then pls donate my winnings to a charity that supports the victims of the Iraq war; both the servicemen and the civilians
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