The towers were designed to survive a plane impact

Absolutely. The likelihood that a fire could soften steel is ridiculous.
I've never heard such a silly thing.
Well, keep in mind a hot enough fire could. You can melt steel in a furnace but this steel was designed to withstand fire for this exact reason.
 
Well, keep in mind a hot enough fire could. You can melt steel in a furnace but this steel was designed to withstand fire for this exact reason.

Exactly. This is what I meant. I doubt anyone here has heard this argument before. It's absolutely brand new to this forum. I'm really waiting to see what kind of answers you get.
 
dflynn,

"The towers were built to withstand a jet impact" is a myth. An urban legend.

It is false.

Yeah, I know perfectly well that it gets repeated over & over. Famously by Frank DeMartini, the building manager in 2001.

As in THIS VIDEO.

Mr. DeMartini was a bona fide hero of 9/11, who gave his life that day trying to save others, while knowing the risks. And deserves all the respect in the world for those actions.

But he was a building manager. His job was to deal with the day to day running of an already constructed office complex. This means dealing with unions, project scheduling, & city hall. He didn't know diddly about Structural Engineering, as proven by his "pencil & screen netting" comment. I invite any one of you to show me some "structural" screen netting, loaded in high levels of compression. The answer is "the screen netting is unaffected by the pencil poke precisely because it is weak & flexible & in tension, not compression." Things that are weak & flexible & loaded in tension are singularly useless at holding up buildings.

Notice that the author of this video has "promoted" Mr. DeMartini to "Designer of the Twin Towers". Great. I guess John Skilling decided to hire a grammar school kid in 1963 to design the tallest building in the world, eh?

This is precisely the type of false, unverified, uncritical stories that underlie all of the truth movement's nonsense.

Listen to one of the real design engineers of the towers, Leslie Robertson, in an interview after 9/11/2001.

"We should not and can not design buildings and structures to resist the impact of these aircraft. Instead, we must concentrate our efforts on keeping aircraft away from our tall buildings, sports stadiums, symbolic buildings, atomic plants, and other potential targets"
Leslie Robertson, Structural Engineer, WTC
http://www.nae.edu/Publications/The...ecurity/ReflectionsontheWorldTradeCenter.aspx

Did you catch that? "We should not and can not design buildings and structures to resist the impact of these aircraft."

So, what happened between 1964 & 2002? Did we lose the ability to design buildings to withstand aircraft impacts? No. The answer is, we never had it. And we still don't really have it today. (Engineers can make buildings much safer against this form of attack. They CAN NOT design any building - other than windowless 10-foot thick domes, like nuclear reactor containment domes - to withstand airplane impacts.

In order to come close, it takes supercomputers & FEA software, neither of which existed in 1964. They didn't have electronic calculators. They had slide rules. There is no way on earth to do that sort of a calculation with slide rules.
___

OK, the back-story behind "the towers were built to withstand jet impacts"...

What it would take to do this analysis:

Scientists & engineers are pretty damn clever. But there are serious limitations to the calculations that we could make about "real world" parts, prior to 1970s & '80s. That is, prior to the availability of Finite Element Analysis programs. The very first of these programs (NASTRAN) became available in the 1970s & 80s.

The memo that NIST is quoting was dated Feb 3, 1964, prepared by Malcom Levy, the head of planning & construction for the PANYNJ. So there is zero possibility that those software tools were used.

So, where did the myth originate? James Glanz's book "City in the Sky" has the story.

No one knows who started the calculation, but it was apparently carried out by some un-named engineers working for the PANYNJ, under the direction of Levy.

Here's an except from Glanz's book:

*****

"The first part of the calculation would have been quite simple. The towers had been designed to withstand the forces of windstorms with gusts of at least 120 miles an hour. Specifically, they were supposed to hold up against at Least forty-five pounds of lateral force on every square foot without shearing off and toppling. Each tower would be about 1,350 feet tall and 209 feet across on each face: 282,150 square feet. So if a wind sufficient to exert forty-five pounds per square foot of force was blowing directly against one of the faces. that would be about 13 million pounds. all told. And the tower should stand, with a standard safety margin of perhaps 30 to 40 percent to spare.

To figure out if the plane had a chance of tipping the tower over. Mal Levy’s engineers needed to estimate how much force the collision might produce. A Boeing 707 made a B-25 look like an insect in comparison. With a tip-to-tip wingspan of 131 feet and a fuel capacity of more than twenty thousand gallons. a fully loaded 707 can weigh 300,000 pounds on takeoff, and its cruising speed is about 600 miles per hour. The engineers knew that parts of the little B-25 flew all the way through the limestone-encased Empire State Building and out the other side. So it might have been reasonable to assume that the bigger. faster 707. after plowing into the much more compliant facade of a World Trade Center tower, would not come to a complete stop before it reached the opposite side of the floor, 209 feet away. It is a complicated problem to figure out precisely how hard the plane might push on the tower during a collision, but given the plane’s known weight. initial speed, and stopping distance, any freshman engineering student could come up with a rough estimate. The number turns out to be 17 million pounds, probably within the safety margin.

Levy’s engineers had discovered that not even a speeding 707 would shear off one of the towers."

*****

I believe that Glanz has this just slightly wrong. "Shearing" implies that the building slides off of its base. This is a silly, unrealistic failure mode. Structural engineers would recognize this. The proper failure mode would be "tipping", in which the building fractures at the highest stress point (i.e., right at ground level) and tips over. It is trivial to go from shear to moment calculations, and I believe that this slight variation from the one that Glanz describes is the calculation they would have done.

Notice that the wind shear load was 13 million pounds, and the calculated plane impact shear load was 17 million. And they concluded that this was "probably within the safety margin".

THIS is the level of accuracy that the "design for impact" analysis provided.

The second calculation imagined that a number of the beams on one side of the building, equivalent to the wingspan of the plane, were "surgically removed". As if you just took a Sawzall & cut them out. Absolutely no other damage to any part of the building. No fires, no damaged core columns, no damaged floors, etc.

The question asked: Would the building fall over under this condition.

They found out that it would not.

Clearly, neither one of these very unrealistic & very crude calculations comes anywhere CLOSE to a rigorous analysis upon which one could make the assertion that the building "was designed to withstand a jet impact".

____

So, how did the myth arise?

Intrigue, back-stabbing, bluff & bluster, and sloppy, self-serving interpretations of crude calculations.

Lawrence Wien, the "King" of Manhattan Real Estate was the owner of the Empire State Building (and a bunch of other commercial real estate properties in NYC). He, and several others were desperate to stop the WTC project. They didn't want the competition. Wien knew all about the plane that had hit his building (before he bought it). Wien had read the report on the fire damage & response of the ESB.

In Febuary 13, 1964, "... Wien called reporters to his office high above Forty-second Street, where the elegant silhouette of his most prized possession—the Empire State Building—was framed perfectly in his picture window. ... The twin towers, he claimed, would be dangerously unstable and prone to catastrophe, especially in a large fire or an explosion, when they could collapse."

The PANYNJ was not going to let Wien derail their project.

"What the real estate people did not know was that Levy already had his script prepared. Nor could they have known how far the Port Authority was willing to go to protect its project. On February 14, the day after Wien made his allegations. Lee Jaffe summoned reporters for a briefing at Port Authority headquarters. She distributed a three-page telegram sent that day from Richard Roth, one of the partners at Emery Roth & Sons, the New York architectural firm that had been assigned to work with Yamasaki on the trade center. Under the prestigious imprimatur of his firm, Roth had sent in an urgent rebuttal of Wien’s claims. The telegram “authoritatively refutes the false allegations of ‘real estate figures’ published in THE NEW YORK TIMES today,” Jaffe snarled in the memo she gave to one of those reporters. The telegram was impressive and detailed—pointing out, for example, that for the World Trade Center design.

THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS CARRIED OUT BY THE FIRM OF WORTHINGTON SKILLING, HELLE & JACKSON IS THE MOST COMPLETE AND DETAILED OF ANY EVER MADE FOR ANY BUILDING STRUCTURE. THE PRELIMINARY CALCULATIONS ALONE COVER 1,200 PAGES AND INVOLVE OVER 100 DETAILED DRAWINGS.

Point number three on the list of design features was this:

3. THE BUILDINGS HAVE BEEN INVESTIGATED AND FOUND TO BE SAFE IN AN ASSUMED COLLISION WITH A LARGE JET AIRLINER TRAVELING AT 600 MILES PER HOUR. ANALYSIS INDICATES

There was no elaboration on that assurance, but after a lengthy list of endorsements supposedly given by other architects and engineer, the telegram ended on this note:

11. THE TOWERS MAY BE SAID TO BE THE FIRST BUILDINGS OF THE 21ST CENTURY AND THE DESIGN CONCEPTS WHICH THEY EMBODY WILL BE INCORPORATED IN SOME MEASURE IN EVERY FUTURE HIGH RISE BUILDING EVER BUILT.

RICHARD ROTH
EMERY ROTH & SONS


Mal Levy, Lee Jaffe. and the Port Authority’s engineers had bested the great Lawrence Wien."

The newspaper reporters ran wild with the story.

And an urban myth was born.

That is the story behind the "design to withstand a jet impact".

A bunch of horse-pucky, fed to reporters, who were not competent enough, or skeptical enough, to do their homework.
___

You can read all about this episode HERE. Do a search for "Levy", and read pages 131 thru about 139. It's a fascinating little vignette of the PANYNJ project managers bluffing a businessman and the press. And getting away with it.

BTW, Robertson apparently did some later studies (after the towers were built, IIRC). But nobody has ever been able to find those reports, and the limitations on computers & FEA software in the late 1970s imposes the same limitations on the conclusions of that study as well.

By the time the later studies came along, the myth was already well entrenched.

Anyone who says that "The towers were designed to withstand jet impacts" - and there are LOTS of people who do say this - is parroting an urban myth that they do not understand.


Tom
 
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For the sake of completeness, let me point out that PANY construction supervisor Guy F. Tozzoli commented on this issue, too.
Wir haben damals eine Studie gemacht und ausgerechnet, was passieren würde, wenn das größte Flugzeug, eine 707, einen Turm trifft. Wir sind davon ausgegangen, dass Flugzeuge über New York ihre Geschwindigkeit auf 200 Meilen pro Stunde drosseln müssen. Und dass sie auch nicht voll getankt sein würden, sondern sich im Landeanflug befänden.
This is from a Nov. 2002 interview in a German daily newpaper. My translation:
Back then we conducted a study about what would happen if the biggest plane, a 707, would hit one tower. We assumed that planes across New York would have to reduce their speed to 200 mph. And that they wouldn´t be loaded with maximum fuel, but would approach for a landing.
 
You're a cruel man, Scott.

This is such a unique and powerful argument. I'd like to know where it came from. Did he make it up himself? Or read it somewhere then cut & paste it on to the forum. I'm just dieing to know what creative forces gave birth to this genius. I hope I haven't scared him away with my curiosity.
 
I don't see how office stuff would burn sufficiently hot. From the press reports, ENGINEERING REPORTS, the claim is the steel softened due to the heat. That did not likely happen. [IN MY OPINION]

Fixed that for you.

Hey, have you seen the data on the Carbington Fire Tests?

It's pretty cool. They built a large scale office building with steel. They set it on fire.

Guess what happened?

Lots of the steel failed. Lots of temperatures above 1800 deg. F.

Would you like the data and reports on that?

(For all your veteran's here, our old friend Psikehacker pointed to the Cardington Fire Tests as proof that steel wouldn't fail in a fire, and a typical fire wouldn't reach 1800 deg. F.

Yeah, he pulled an Ergo and stepped into a whole pile of fail! )
 
Did I just see someone try to whip out the "jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel" myth again?

tumblr_lbt0ujj8PP1qa1oth.gif


From http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm:
Based on this comprehensive investigation, NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers. Both photographic and video evidence—as well as accounts from the New York Police Department aviation unit during a half-hour period prior to collapse—support this sequence for each tower.
From http://www.popularmechanics.com/tec.../debunking-911-myths-world-trade-center#steel:
FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength—and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
A previous thread where this was discussed; note the date on it is March 2006!
Another set, from 2007 - 2009:
There's the argument. Now, regarding:
I don't see how office stuff would burn sufficiently hot. From the press reports, the claim is the steel softened due to the heat. That did not likely happen.
That is incorrect. As noted by one of the firefighters on this forum, even common structural fires can easily exceed 1,000oF just through the normal growth cycle alone. Much less the massive acre-wide, multifloor ones in the Twin Towers.

That is all the information needed to put this myth to rest. I suggest that if any further discussion occurs that it be split into one of the prior threads on this topic.

We're done with this here.
 
I don't see how office stuff would burn sufficiently hot. From the press reports, the claim is the steel softened due to the heat. That did not likely happen.
Wow we seem to have a professional metallurgist in our midst.

So come on mister professional lets see you answer these questions because it's obvious that you know exactly what you are talking about and I need to be educated.

1. At what temperature does steel lose half of it's yield strength?

2. What temperatures can be achieved in office fires?

3. What is creep?

4. What is thermal expansion?

You'll also need to provide a reference for your answers.

Thanks.
 
Fixed that for you.

Hey, have you seen the data on the Carbington Fire Tests?

It's pretty cool. They built a large scale office building with steel. They set it on fire.

Guess what happened?

Lots of the steel failed. Lots of temperatures above 1800 deg. F.

Would you like the data and reports on that?

(For all your veteran's here, our old friend Psikehacker pointed to the Cardington Fire Tests as proof that steel wouldn't fail in a fire, and a typical fire wouldn't reach 1800 deg. F.

Yeah, he pulled an Ergo and stepped into a whole pile of fail! )

I keep telling you guys, a little common sense goes way further than a pile of reading. Forget about all those PhDs. If you want to see a PhD in common sense, have a look at some of randman's other posts. He has a PhD in the common sense of evolution and another one in the common sense of property law and Freeman Science. He's a model of that expert Truther I keep talking about.

But for any of those reading-kind-a-folks who might be interested in those reports you talk about, they're all on the Internet here
http://www.civ.ed.ac.uk/research/fire/cardington.html
But where did reading ever get you, except in trouble with the teachers?
 
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I don't see how office stuff would burn sufficiently hot. From the press reports, the claim is the steel softened due to the heat. That did not likely happen.

Where were you 35 years ago? Think of all the money you could have saved them in not having to fireproof all the steel! :boggled:
 
The towers did survive the aircraft impact. What they didn't survive was large scale fires. At the time the towers were built it was impossible for anyone to model fires to any extent that could determine fire survivability.

If anyone tries to claim they designed the buildings to survive those fires, they're lying.
 
Mr. DeMartini was a bona fide hero of 9/11, who gave his life that day trying to save others, while knowing the risks. And deserves all the respect in the world for those actions.

But he was a building manager. His job was to deal with the day to day running of an already constructed office complex. This means dealing with unions, project scheduling, & city hall. He didn't know diddly about Structural Engineering, as proven by his "pencil & screen netting" comment.


Frank A. Demartini, on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center
..... had first worked at World Trade Center when Leslie E. Robertson Associates hired him to assess damage from the truck bombing in 1993.


John Skilling:

John Skilling was a civil engineer and architect, best known for being the chief structural engineer of the World Trade Center...

Prominent constructions under his leadership include the World Trade Center, Rainier Bank Tower, the Seafirst Building, Seafirst Fifth Avenue Tower, Century Square, Columbia Seafirst Center and the Washington State Convention and Trade Center.


http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/547552/John-Skilling

Skilling became a principal of the Witt firm in 1950. He led the evolution of a small, regionally oriented firm into the nationally acclaimed structural engineering organization that it became over the nearly 45 years of his direction. In 1955, the firm became Worthington & Skilling; in 1960 it became Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson; in 1967, Skilling, Helle, Christiansen, Robertson; and in 1983, Skilling Ward Rogers Barkshire. Beginning in 1987 it became Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire until Skilling’s retirement in 1995, when the firm employed a staff of 72.

http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=9632

Leslie Earl Robertson (born 1928) was one of the chief structural engineers of the World Trade Center...as an "up-and-coming engineer", Robertson was contracted by Worthington, Skilling, Helle, and Jackson (WSHJ) to participate in the design of the World Trade Center Twin Towers (1966–1971), his first high rise construction


Engineering perspective of the collapse of WTC-I Irfanoglu, A., Hoffmann, C.M. 2008 Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities 22 (1):

That the World Trade Center Towers withstood the impact loads of commercial aircrafts on September 11, 2001, was not surprising for structural engineers. However, very few in the profession expected the collapse of the towers during the fires that followed.
 
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Thank you for completely supporting EVERYTHING TFK said.

REading for comprehension bites you in the ass again (The claim you BOLD is a bare assertion, without any support to back it up. )...but then again what else can we expect from someone who mixes up
essentially vs actually
into vs onto
a debris field the "size of the moon" vs center of mass
ABOUT
exponentially
who doesn't know about metaphorical speech
and thinks that EXPLOSIONS are all caused by EXPLOSIVES

It is funny though.
From your own citation
Conclusions
Impact simulations indicate that the damage states of the WTC-I core structural elements are
very sensitive to analysis parameters and as such, it is not possible to suggest the exact state of
the core framing after the aircraft impact. Simulations indicate consistently that the worst
damage to the core structure was sustained in the 95th through 97th stories of the tower.
For both the intact and plausible compromised core states considered, it is estimated that a core
collapse mechanism could have been initiated in WTC-I if the tower core column temperatures
were elevated to approximately 700oC. As the aircraft debris went through several stories in the
tower, much of the thermal insulation on the core columns would have been scoured off. Under
such conditions, the ensuing fire would be sufficient to cause instability and initiate collapse.
From an engineering perspective, impact damage to the core structure had a negligible effect on
the critical thermal load required to initiate collapse in the core structure
.

So it wasn't the core, but the FIRE which brought the towers down. I'm glad you agree.
 
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Well, I don't normally wade into these debates on this topic but jet fuel does not burn at a temperature sufficient to melt steel, at least the kind they built the Twin Towers with.

Wow. It's like my long-dead grandfather just came alive before my eyes.
 
And more for ergo to ignore as he datamines but then doesn't understand it... (like his stepping onto his dick over bazant and footprint)

From his same citation
It is evident from observation and our simulations that the debris of the aircraft went through theWTC structure at stories 94 through 97. Much of the fire insulation would have been scoured off leaving the steel elements unprotected during the immediately following fire event. Experimental data for steel in that condition (Buchanan 2000) indicate that the metal temperature in all unprotected structural elements would have reached 700 oC in a typical office fire. That condition would suffice to initiate instability (e.g. Ali and O’Connor 2001, Wang and Davies 2003) even if all the girders were intact and the failure mechanism was limited to one story of the core
structure
.

so they AGREE with bazant... even though you say they don't. It is rather amusing...
 
Like Thunder said they did survive the impacts. Many people credit the engineering for saving lives in that respect. On the other hand, many believe the design and placement of the stairwells was one of the main causes of loss of life above the impact zone.

Most tall buildings are designed around a central core where the vertical penetrations (stairwells and elevator shafts) are located, for good reason: It optimizes the rentable area and window views. However, I suspect more buildings will have that central core reinforced with concrete, which might have saved some lives on 9-11 (and cost the lives of that group of trapped elevator passengers who were able to bust through the drywall and escape through a restroom).
 

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