The Twin Towers at free fall speed

[jay howard]

Great.

Then present your thesis as to how NIST is wrong. Get it peer reviewed and published in ANY peer reviewed engineering journal and you will be the FIRST twoof.

It should be easy. I for one know that I would LOVE to read that paper... why are you wasting your time here?

Normally I would just ignore the flamers here, but since this discussion is pretty much over (as in we will agree to disagree), the point of engaging here is to see the actual substance of the best counterarguments--to see if indeed I simply have a crappy theory and if the NIST report is actually sufficient.


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[jay howard]

And since jay howard has missed it, I guess I'll explain. The purpose of the tests performed in NIST 1-5B were to verify that their thermal parameters and mesh size in the analysis were close enough to real behavior in a fire to be valid. And that's it. It was not to test the conclusion of the analysis.

So did they attempt to test their conclusions anywhere besides inside the simulations?


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[NutCracker]

So did they attempt to test their conclusions anywhere besides inside the simulations?


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And from one "anomaly" our dear "intellectual" twoofie swiftly hops to another "anomaly."


Look twoofy pal, what is stopping you to write up any wrong you find in the NIST report in a nice paper and have it published in a peer reviewed engeneering journal?

Can't be ignorance, nay, can't be.

 

[Newtons Bit]

So did they attempt to test their conclusions anywhere besides inside the simulations?


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So do you admit that your previous railing against the tests and NIST was based on incorrect information?

 

[TruthersLie]

Normally I would just ignore the flamers here, but since this discussion is pretty much over (as in we will agree to disagree), the point of engaging here is to see the actual substance of the best counterarguments--to see if indeed I simply have a crappy theory and if the NIST report is actually sufficient.


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See... piss poor reading comprehension combined with an overinflated sense of ego.

I wasn't flaming. I was making a DIRECT fact. I personally would LOVE to read any refutation of ANY PART of the NIST reports from the towers or from wtc7. After a full year of the final report of wtc7, there is no hew and cry from the engineering community and Truthers can't get a single peer reviewed paper ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. IN ANY LANGUGE.

I really would love to read it.

Yet here you go mewling and bleating on some internet forum. It has been explained to you REPEATEDLY and shown to you, yet you keep trying to be cute and trig.

Please. Pretty please write up your refutation of the errors made in the NIST report and submit them to any academic, peer reviewed journal. You will go down as the FIRST truther to be botherd to show the world that the US government murdered 3,000 of its own citizens and had a very respected investigative branch cover it up.

 

[daws59]

See... piss poor reading comprehension combined with an overinflated sense of ego.

I wasn't flaming. I was making a DIRECT fact. I personally would LOVE to read any refutation of ANY PART of the NIST reports from the towers or from wtc7. After a full year of the final report of wtc7, there is no hew and cry from the engineering community and Truthers can't get a single peer reviewed paper ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. IN ANY LANGUGE.

I really would love to read it.

Yet here you go mewling and bleating on some internet forum. It has been explained to you REPEATEDLY and shown to you, yet you keep trying to be cute and trig.

Please. Pretty please write up your refutation of the errors made in the NIST report and submit them to any academic, peer reviewed journal. You will go down as the FIRST truther to be botherd to show the world that the US government murdered 3,000 of its own citizens and had a very respected investigative branch cover it up.

like that's gonna happen..

 

[alienentity]

Normally I would just ignore the flamers here, but since this discussion is pretty much over (as in we will agree to disagree), the point of engaging here is to see the actual substance of the best counterarguments--to see if indeed I simply have a crappy theory and if the NIST report is actually sufficient.


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Hi Jay,

Just perusing this thread for anything interesting... I have a couple questions for you:

1) How fast should the towers have fallen, given their structures?

2) What are the approximate times for each collapse, not including the core sections which remained for up to 30 seconds?

Cite engineering papers where possible to support your ideas, or your own engineering calculations. That way others can look at the bones of your theories, if you indeed have any.

It seems to me that you are pretty much nit-picking about the kind of tests that NIST did, without actually invalidating any of their conclusions. I'd have to conclude that you don't like NIST for some unknown, unexplained reason.

Perhaps you can enlighten me.

ETA I almost forgot, I created a little video for the exact purpose of finding out how long it took for WTC1 to fall. Take a look, it's pretty straightforward. If you still think it's 'close' to freefall perhaps you can explain how much energy was lost and where it might have gone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAYXdafNl6E

 

[tsig]

like that's gonna happen..

When the Devil starts buying long-johns.

 

[jaydeehess]

And since jay howard has missed it, I guess I'll explain. The purpose of the tests performed in NIST 1-5B were to verify that their thermal parameters and mesh size in the analysis were close enough to real behavior in a fire to be valid. And that's it. It was not to test the conclusion of the analysis.

Thank you NB> I thought I had said as much above but jay continues to push the idea that the tests were designed to find out how fast the steel got hot when it was actually a test to see if the simulation could predict what would occur in the test thus validating the sim's approach to such predictions.

this is made quite clear in the first few pages of the report.

 

[jaydeehess]

And you know this how? Did you intuit this?

Read it somewhere but it, yes, intuitively it seems correct. As part of my job a few years ago I had to run cabling above the drop ceiling in a 1 storey school building. The concrete roof was on the same type of steel deck with similar trusses embedded in the concrete. It was apparent that the steel pan was there to allow on site pouring of the concrete as in those places where there was a small gap the mixed cement had oozed through forming a small lump.

In a fire situation the steel might help reflect IR and keep the concrete a little cooler for a brief time but steel conducts heat so well that I don't think it would do much to keep the concrete cooler. As the concrete heats up and spalls the steel could act to keep loose debris from falling but by the time the concrete gets that hot there is no danger to any living person on the floor below it and the steel will sag and fail if the concrete is spalled so widely that all that is holding it up is the steel.
I suppose it could act to spread the heat from a small localized fire and keep the concrete directly above such a fire from attacking the concrete.

22 gauge steel pan however would not, I believe offer much in the way of structural support. All it needs to do is support the weight of the wet cement.

So you think the decision to use steel thicknesses that "were sized so that 600 C temperatures could be obtained with a fire release rate (Q) of 2 MW to 3 MW in less than an hour" was a way to keep costs down? Really?

Yeah, I believe that could very well be a, or the, reason.
BTW how do you think it was determined that this thickness of steel would reach a temp of 600 C in such conditions?

There is a perfectly reasonable explanation of this test, but the fact is it is not a test of how hot steel gets under certain temps for a known amount of time.

If you read the docuement you will see that that is not the main reason for these tests either. You have it backwards. The tests were not done in order to devise the sims. they were done to validate the sims.
Sim programs first, test to validate the program.

This is the issue here: we know a few things for certain about the tower collapses:

1. How long the fires burned
2. How hot office materials, jet fuel and other hydrocarbon surrogates burn
3. The chemical make up and geometric config of steel members of WTC

So, if my theory is that fire heated the steel and weakened it, that is a very testable theory given all we already know. By extension, if you take the floor trusses and heat them hotter and for longer than the fires burned, and load them to their maximum capacity, and they do NOT exhibit the same degree of deformation as the simulations, what can you conclude from that?

That the tests must be leaving something out?

No, that you are describing a completely different test than what is described in NCSTAR1-5 and for an entirely different reason.

That the simulations do not correspond to the conditions they purport to represent?

No the simulations do corresspond to the conditions they were meant to test. That is to say they corresspond to the conditions in the test run of the sim program in order to determine how closely the program can predict what occurs.


Clear now?

 

[jaydeehess]

So did they attempt to test their conclusions anywhere besides inside the simulations?


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Huh???

The physical tests done in NCSTAR 1-5 were done to corroborate the conclusions that the sims came to.

Once again;
The sims made use of the past century of information on how steel and steel structres behave in fires. That done, did NIST engineers believe that since they devised it it must be all good? (the "my feces does not stink" theory of how professionals work) NO! They then devised a scale test with some parameters that approximate those that would be in effect in the towers, an idealized situation in order to keep margins of error low, and queried, via the sim program, what the results would be for the steel. They then actually ran a physical test and compared the real world results with the virtual world results and discovered that all was good with the program.

What you are describing is something that would make designing and running a computer sim program unneccessary. Why in God's name would you bother designing a fire sim program if you were then simply going to duplicate the conditions in the towers in a real world physical test run?

You understand the reason for such computer modelling(I keep saying sim but that's inaccurate), right?

 

[jaydeehess]

As much as jay protests that it is not what he wants, he is inching towards a full scale physical test of the tower imapct/fires/collapses.

 

[DavidJames]

As much as jay protests that it is not what he wants, he is inching towards a full scale physical test of the tower imapct/fires/collapses.

What I think Jay is doing is much like what many others do, find out what isn't available, in terms of evidence etc., and demand it be presented.

 

[aggle-rithm]

As much as jay protests that it is not what he wants, he is inching towards a full scale physical test of the tower imapct/fires/collapses.

More like the Holy Grail of trutherism: They need logically impossible action! NOW, before it's too late!

 

[jay howard]

So do you admit that your previous railing against the tests and NIST was based on incorrect information?

You're right. I admit that criticizing that test as a test of their conclusions is unfair on my part.

There are still some problems with this test like, how hot was the flame and subsequent gases produced? Were those temperatures analogous to the temps in the towers?

I've looked all through that test and all it gives is the heat release rate of 2MW or 3MW but never gives a discreet temperature/time curve like they did for all the components. Why not? Don't you think that would useful information to make sense of the tests?

The problem with a heat release rate as a measure of temperature is that it does not take into account compartment size, ventilation or time. Several times they talk about the components being "immersed in flame" and therefore hotter than other components but fail to differentiate the difference in temp between the flame and the metal.

And finally, if the criteria specifically called for parts that would get to 600C in an hour, what good does it do to report that the components reached 600C? The main problem is the issue of the heat release rate. It doesn't tell us the volume of gas to be heated--which is critical to a test designed to measure "thermal response" of components.

But, not to shy away from my mistake before, yes, my original criticism of this test as a test of their final conclusions was unfounded.

How hot was the gas? How big was the compartment? These unanswered questions make the test difficult to assess for any real-world theory.

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[Newtons Bit]

You're right. I admit that criticizing that test as a test of their conclusions is unfair on my part.

Congratulations. You've done what 99% of truthers cannot do.

There are still some problems with this test like, how hot was the flame and subsequent gases produced? Were those temperatures analogous to the temps in the towers?

I've looked all through that test and all it gives is the heat release rate of 2MW or 3MW but never gives a discreet temperature/time curve like they did for all the components. Why not? Don't you think that would useful information to make sense of the tests?

The heat of the flame isn't as relevant as the rate of release and total energy content. See Chapter 3.

The problem with a heat release rate as a measure of temperature is that it does not take into account compartment size, ventilation or time. Several times they talk about the components being "immersed in flame" and therefore hotter than other components but fail to differentiate the difference in temp between the flame and the metal.

This is why they determined the ENERGY content released, not a "temperature released" which isn't even possible.

And finally, if the criteria specifically called for parts that would get to 600C in an hour, what good does it do to report that the components reached 600C? The main problem is the issue of the heat release rate. It doesn't tell us the volume of gas to be heated--which is critical to a test designed to measure "thermal response" of components.

The size of the compartment is given out precisely in the first sentence of the second paragraph of chapter 2.

But, not to shy away from my mistake before, yes, my original criticism of this test as a test of their final conclusions was unfounded.

How hot was the gas? How big was the compartment? These unanswered questions make the test difficult to assess for any real-world theory.

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Please read the entirety of NCSTAR 1-5B. It appears you quote mined a small sub-section that deals with this one test.

 

[tfk]

J.

You're right. I admit that criticizing that test as a test of their conclusions is unfair on my part.

I sit in shock...

Congratulations on this rare action.

There are still some problems with this test like, how hot was the flame and subsequent gases produced? Were those temperatures analogous to the temps in the towers?

I've looked all through that test and all it gives is the heat release rate of 2MW or 3MW but never gives a discreet temperature/time curve like they did for all the components. Why not? Don't you think that would useful information to make sense of the tests?

I think that you don't fully understand the difference between temperature & heat.

Heat release is the proper consideration here.

The problem with a heat release rate as a measure of temperature is that it does not take into account compartment size, ventilation or time. Several times they talk about the components being "immersed in flame" and therefore hotter than other components but fail to differentiate the difference in temp between the flame and the metal.

And finally, if the criteria specifically called for parts that would get to 600C in an hour, what good does it do to report that the components reached 600C? The main problem is the issue of the heat release rate. It doesn't tell us the volume of gas to be heated--which is critical to a test designed to measure "thermal response" of components.

Nothing "called for parts to get to 600C". In any time frame.

The temperature of the steel in the towers did not need to get anywhere close to 600° in order for the towers to collapse. At the stress levels that they saw from the physical damage, the creep that ultimately initiated the collapse would be expected at temperature in the 300°C range.

The steel temperatures in WTC7 that led to its collapse were also never anywhere close to 600°C. If you read the report carefully, you will see this described in detail.



Tom

 

[jaydeehess]

J.

Nothing "called for parts to get to 600C". In any time frame.

The temperature of the steel in the towers did not need to get anywhere close to 600° in order for the towers to collapse. At the stress levels that they saw from the physical damage, the creep that ultimately initiated the collapse would be expected at temperature in the 300°C range.

The steel temperatures in WTC7 that led to its collapse were also never anywhere close to 600°C. If you read the report carefully, you will see this described in detail.



Tom

IIRC the 600C temp is that at which steel loses 50% of its strength. It is TM fallacy that this was the temp that the steel had to reach to have collapse initiate.

The columns were under a significantly greater average load than they were designed for but , of course, some columns were experiencing more stress than were others and some were offering no structural support at all, having been severed in the impact.
Immediatly following impact the jet fuel spread out over several floors and ignited in a deflagration that caused an immediate multifloor and wide area office fire.
The impact and deflagration also abraded a significant percentage of the fire insulation on the steel in the very areas now subject to this office fire.
The steel most susceptable to the fire would be the long span trusses. When these sag they pull on the columns. If a truss fails(there are pictures of collapsed trusses) , the columns they ae attached to lose lateral bracing and thus are more prone to buckling.
Combine all of these added stresses and it would not be neccessary for columns to reach 600C to sag and buckle.

Some in the TM have made much of steel woodstoves that do not sag and buckle. They neglect to acknowledge that such stoves are in a no load situation other than their own weight and that the pedestal or feet of these stoves carry the most of the gravity load AND are the coolest parts of the stove. I can touch the feet of mine barehanded while a fire rages in the firebox only inches away.

Others have stated that hydrocarbon fires cannot acheive 1000F. However in Canada at least, fire codes specify a chimney that can withstand an internal temp of 2100F

The ULC code specifies:
Max Continuous 650°C (1200°F)
Brief Forced Firing 925°C (1700°F)
Tested To 1150°C (2100°F)

Hmmm, I wonder why?

 

[sylvan8798]

Some in the TM have made much of steel woodstoves that do not sag and buckle. They neglect to acknowledge that such stoves are in a no load situation other than their own weight and that the pedestal or feet of these stoves carry the most of the gravity load AND are the coolest parts of the stove. I can touch the feet of mine barehanded while a fire rages in the firebox only inches away.

Whoa! You mean to say that the feet don't "wick away" the heat of the steel above like a giant heat sink? (that's another trutherism that always fries my chicken)

 

[jay howard]

The heat of the flame isn't as relevant as the rate of release and total energy content. See Chapter 3.

This is why they determined the ENERGY content released, not a "temperature released" which isn't even possible.

It's not that the measure of energy release is more relevant or more easily testable. It's another way to measure energy and heat but it's not necessarily a more accurate way to assess the situation in the towers.

In all the fine detail they go into about the uncertainty the various types of thermocouples introduce, the way the hydrocarbon fuel was mixed and dispersed, the position of the steel members to the flame, etc., they couldn't or didn't put some ambient thermometers to calculate the gas temperatures?

You may feel the urge to accuse me of nitpicking the test "to my standards" but don't you think that the gas temperature would be a useful bit of information in a test of this sort? And while they're going through the laborious task of building the structures and configuring the tests, why in the world would they choose NOT to measure the gas temps?

A skeptic would say something like, "the testers probably DID measure the gas temps, but that info was left out because either:

1. gas temps added no new info
2. they forgot
3. the test designers did not specifically call for a measure of gas temps
or
They really didn't measure the gas temps because...?

Worst-case scenario for supporters of the official CT is that the test designers are guilty of poor test design. Most will shrug this measurement off as "unnecessary," adding something about heat and temp and tacking on a circumstantial ad hom about my ignorance.

Doesn't change the facts about this scenario: there is no clear theory being tested about the temperatures the steel needed to get to in order to exhibit the theorized failure modes.

Steel structures are not rated against a "heat-release rate," they are rated against temperature and time. Why is that not a good standard to test the structures?

The size of the compartment is given out precisely in the first sentence of the second paragraph of chapter 2.

Yea, that's me again. Thanks.


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