Molten steel at Ground Zero?

There is a rather heated arguement on sci.skeptic going on right now that seems to involve some conspiracy nuts claiming that pools of "molten steel" were found at ground zero during the cleanup. Of course, evidence for this is sorely lacking: mostly bad reporters writing, second hand accounts. But no pictures or videos that I could find.

Now the arguement goes that if pools of molten steel were found, then something hotter than jet fuel melted it. The implication is that evil conspirators used thermite (which will melt steel) to collapse the building and all that fun stuff.

Of course, there seems to be no first hand account of molten steel at ground zero, but we are assured that "everyone who worked there saw it". I guess my question would be, is there any evidence for molten steel, and if so, what could have caused it? (As you may well guess I find the idea of thermite, especially using thermite to collapse a building, rather....unlikely.)

Even were it thermite I can't imagine the pools of molten steel being there for very long.

Steel as we know conducts heat to and form itself quite readily which means at extremely high temps, it tends to cool fairly rapidly.

Hand steel workers shaping metal at high temps have to constantly re-heat the metal because it rapidly becomes too cool to remain malleable. (think swordsmith) Even thermite torches must be re-applied after a short period. If Steel didn't harden almost immediately after the heating process stopped, then the process of welding would be pointless.

Aid workers wouldn't have been there until hours later. I'm sure it was at least an hour after the collapse before even emergency law enforcement was allowed near the site.

If there were ever any molten pools of metal, I cannot believe for a second they were seen by anybody alive to tell the tale.

I've seen somthing like this on the analisys of the way the building colapsed and why. Nova I believe, no specific rumor tho. The collapse was caused by the melting of the main vertical support beams which were steel ..so slag ? I'm not sure, but the program said "melted". The whole building turned into a kiln/furnace and was powered by the updrafts and fuled by plastics, paper, low melting point alloys. If you keep in mind that demascus steel was formed in a hand fired furnace, which was fuled by camel dung and you can form it and mokume (?sp) which is the layered alloy steel used to make Katana and samiuri swords, in a small hand fired furnace , you can see that you dont need to have a super hot catalyst to melt steel, just the right environment . This was a hugh , very hot fire.

TillEulenspiegel said:

which is the layered alloy steel used to make Katana and samiuri swords, in a small hand fired furnace , you can see that you dont need to have a super hot catalyst to melt steel, just the right environment . This was a hugh , very hot fire.

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True, however, the steel in the WTC didn't need to melt, and I haven't seen any evidence it did. (Bear in mind I used to live 25 miles west of it)

All that had to happen was to make the steel more plastic, by affecting the grain structure, which starts to happen at temperatures just slightly above boiling.

And that was a forgone conclusion in that fire, I think.

I get the impression that the "pools" are supposed to be found inside piles of debris that act as makeshift furnaces.

I suspect that steel that is very hot (1000 F) but not at the melting point will glow noticeablely in direct sunlight. This can ahppen at the temperatures described and may be what some folks are calling "molten steel" in some cases.

Steel loses something like 50% of its tensile strength at 500 C, which the burning jet fuel could have easily caused.

The grain structure does not really change much until you get to around 1300 F. At that point the whole crystal structure of the iron changes from a ferritic structure to ausetnite. This structure is very hard when fast quenched but very soft while at temperature. This is also a prime temperature for hot rolling steel or blacksmiths working a forge. If you can see a bright glow in a piece of iron or steel, it is above 1300 F.

Some reports on the collapse of the WTC did talk about the steel melting. I think they were oversimplifying what happened. The normal result of mentioning austenite to a non-metallurgist is a big blank stare and lots of questions.

Also steel may be a great conductor of heat, but it has its limits. The math on thermal conductivity is similar to electrical conductivity. You can only move so much heat through a chunk of metal over a period of time. That is why a branding iron left in a fire normally only glows on the end in the fire. The heat can only be conducted so fast through the metal. Of course, if you grab the “cold” end, you will still burn your hand……



(Note: I am a controls engineer who works in a steel mill and used to work on heat treat furnaces. Not a metallurgist.)

I think the cause of collapse had to do with how the floors were attached to the main structure.

Those bracket became weakened and the floor fell onto the next, adding weight, causing it in turn to collapse again, adding more weight etc etc until you reach the point where the building collapses like an accordian. There would be no need to melt metal to the point of molten pools.

I have heard in the various docu-what-have-yous that burning jet fuel poured down the elevator shafts. Perhaps an eye-witness saw a pool of this at the bottom of the building before it collapsed and mistook it for molten steel??

Yes Doubt raises somthing I haden't even thought of....temper. When a steel alloy is formed it is tempered or sintered. It's properties then change to make it harder by becoming a isotropic or crystiline structure. Reheating the alloy to this phase point reduceses its hardness and melting point ( temper ), so now the fire is at a greater temperature then the "normal " compound would endure without melting or becoming completely plastic. Now this is my recolection of a conversation I had with a meterials guy years ago so if the verbiage is a little off , don't smack me too hard. I do believe the principle is sound.

The guy usta take bets on who could drill through a ball bearing..=)

The person to ask would be a metallurgist.

Doubt said:

The grain structure does not really change much until you get to around 1300 F. At that point the whole crystal structure of the iron changes from a ferritic structure to ausetnite. This structure is very hard when fast quenched but very soft while at temperature. This is also a prime temperature for hot rolling steel or blacksmiths working a forge. If you can see a bright glow in a piece of iron or steel, it is above 1300 F.

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Interesting. I know some kinds of steel tempering only use temps on the order of 400 degrees F, and I've met alloys that claimed to detemper at ordinary oven temperatures... Not sure what's going on in such cases...

Certainly if it got all the way to austinite at temperature, there's no strength left to speak of...

The conspiracy theorists are looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The fire didn't need to melt steel. All you need is the steel to weaken enough in key bolts that held the horizontal floor girders attached from the central shaft to the outer walls. This isn't that hard to do, the temperature doesn't need to be that high, especially since the force of the impact explosion blew the fire protection coating off the girders. Once those key bolts break, collapse happens one of two ways IIRC (different for the two towers): on one tower, the central shaft was badly damaged, and finally collapsed. Once it started collapsing, the remaining horizontal girders (which aren't supposed to provide vertical support to either the shaft or the shell) basically just pull the outer shell down with it. On the other tower, when enough of the horizontal girders collapsed, the outer shell beams just buckled outwards. Once it starts buckling, there isn't enough strength in it even without any heat damage to keep it from collapsing. And with both towers, once collapse initiates, the lower floors can't take the impact of the upper floors falling on them, since it produces so much more force than just the weight of the upper sections.

Once you get to austenite, you may as well have silly putty instead of steel. We are pretty much in agreement that melting was not needed for the collapse.

Side note:

Most of the heat treat lines I worked on had two furnaces. One for hardening and carburizing. The other was for tempering. Carburize (spelling?) at 1550 F or up to 1750 F for a few hours, then quench in oil at about 350F. Wash them off and on to the temper furnace which could run from 300 F to as high as 1100 F for around an hour.

The tempering would reduce the amount of austenite in the outer case so the part would be less brittle. Your car engine and transmission has many parts treated in a similar way.

The primary source for the conspiracists in the Sci.skeptic thread: "What *IF* There was Molten Steel in the WTC Basements? was Re: THE MYSTERY OF THE WTC COLLAPSE" is the American Free Press story: "Seismic Evidence Points to Underground
Explosions Causing WTC Collapse"

AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site. "Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the basements." These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said. The molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon.

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Ladewig said:

The primary source for the conspiracists in the Sci.skeptic thread: "What *IF* There was Molten Steel in the WTC Basements? was Re: THE MYSTERY OF THE WTC COLLAPSE" is the American Free Press story: "Seismic Evidence Points to Underground
Explosions Causing WTC Collapse"

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What a complete load of crap that site is. I'll start with this:

"In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed."

But the towers didn't collapse from the bottom. They collapsed from the top, where the planes hit. On one of the towers with collapsed from buckling of the outer shell, that's quite visible, everybody saw that, it's on dozens of tapes. On the other tower, although it's the central support shaft that started collapsing first, it had been directly hit by a plane. We know it was badly damaged because people couldn't escape down it. There's no mystery for why it would collapse. And had the central collumn collapsed from the bottom, there would have been signs of impact coming from the bottom (as debris built up and shot out sideways), but everything was clearly top-down. So they argument doesn't make any sense to begin with. There are other problems of logic as well, such as:

"Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat. This is impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel, burning in air is 1520° F (825° C). Because the WTC fires were fuel rich (as evidenced by the thick black smoke) it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit of 825° C."

They obviously don't have a good graps of physics. The limit on temperatures of materials burning in the atmosphere is imposed by the rate of heat loss. If you insulate the burning and retain heat, you can get to much higher temperatures, and a concrete basement certainly provides the possibility of insulation to retain heat. I'm not saying that necessarily happened, just that they don't know what they're talking about.

"Last November, Lerner-Lam said, "During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage — but not causing significant ground shaking,"

Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was many times more powerful than the total potential energy released by the falling mass of the huge towers."

That just plain doesn't make any sense. The second paragraph, the author's conclusions, have no logical basis in the quote from the expert or anything else. Most of the energy in the collapse of the towers did not go into shaking the ground - that says nothing about how much energy it took to shake the ground, or where that energy came from.

Then they go into some strange conspiracy theory about the sale of the steel. NIST performed tests on the steel to see how and why it buckled and collapsed - I've seen some of the twisted remains on the NIST campus. We know the answers. They don't need to test most of the steel, there's no mystery, and testing all of it wouldn't help even if there was a mystery. They probably didn't test specifically for explosions (whatever that would mean anyways) because there was never any evidence for explosions. Because there were no explosions

The $70 per ton vs $120 per ton difference may come from costs associated with collecting and separating the scrap, as well as the cost of shipping the stuff all the way to China. There's no mystery to be solved here, and there's no conspiracy.

Actually, that site is even worse than I thought. Looking through some of their other pages about it, it's clear that these people are completely nuts. A point-by-point refutation is probably useless (though if anyone's interested about specific points, I'm sure we can all pick them apart rather easily). But it's really disheartening to see hwo wacked out some people really are about this sort of crap. Their arguments aren't even interally consistent, let alone connected to reality.

Ladewig said:

The primary source for the conspiracists in the Sci.skeptic thread: "What *IF* There was Molten Steel in the WTC Basements? was Re: THE MYSTERY OF THE WTC COLLAPSE" is the American Free Press story: "Seismic Evidence Points to Underground
Explosions Causing WTC Collapse"

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If yo ulook further into the thread, you will see that this Loizeaux guy never actaully saw the molten metal himself. He says his contractors saw it and that there was video and photos. He's just naive and wrong.

I would just bet that the source of this "molten steel" thing is the fact that there WAS molten aluminum, from the plane, pouring down the side of the building.

http://www.scieneering.com/wtc_update.html

A photograph leaked from the ASCE-FEMA investigation shows a stream of what appears to be molten aluminum exiting from the northeast corner.

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Also. found this.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/rd/2002/jan.html#2

WTC Cover Story. MIT researchers penned a cover story on the World Trade Center collapse for the December 2001 Journal of Metals. The title: "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation." Professor Thomas Eagar and graduate student Christopher Musso write, "...there is widespread speculation" about why the buildings collapsed so suddenly. In their piece, the two attempt to "separate the fact from the fiction" with respect to the catastrophe by discussing three major events involved: the airplane impact, the ensuing fire, and the collapse itself. "The fire is the most misunderstood part of the WTC collapse. Even today, the media report (and many scientists believe) that the steel melted.... This is not true." The two explain their reasoning with a primer on combustion science and the fact that "people (including engineers) often confuse temperature and heat." They further debunk some reports that "the aluminum from the plane ignited, creating very high temperatures." Although the steel did not melt, it did lose "at least half its strength" and deform.

This "weakening and deformation caused a few floors to fall, while the weight of the stories above them crushed the floors below, initiating a domino collapse." They stress that the structure "was not defectively designed. No designer of the WTC anticipated, nor should have anticipated, a [huge] Molotov cocktail on one of the building floors." Eagar is in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Musso in the Sloan School of Management.

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http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Eagar/Eagar-0112.html

Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation
Thomas W. Eagar and Christopher Musso

There have been numerous reports detailing the cause of the World Trade Center Tower collapse on September 11, 2001. Most have provided qualitative explanations; however, simple quantitative analyses show that some common conclusions are incorrect; for example, the steel could not melt in these flames and there was more structural damage than merely softening of the steel at elevated temperatures. Some guidelines for improvements in future structures are presented...[more]

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There are two "theories" which have become articles of faith among the conspiracy-buff crowd:

1. That the towers didn't collapse because of damage done by the airplanes' impact and the uncontrollable fires which followed, but were a controlled demolition accomplished by explosives planted in the buildings.

2. That there weren't any hijackers. The planes were taken over by remote control (by evil intelligence agencies, natch- either the CIA, the Mossad, or both, depending on who your interlocutor hates the most) and flown into the buildings in that manner.

#1 is based entirely on appearances. The contention is that the puffs of dust seen emerging as the towers collapsed were the detonation of explosive charges, and that reports of explosion-like noises during the collapse were the sound of charges going off. The fundamental idea is that it looked like an "implosion", therfore it must have been one.

This is actually a nearly self-debunking contention. The premise is based on a perceived similarity in apperance between the towers' collapse and known "implosion" demolitions. Consequently, if the appearances are in fact not congruent, the contention fails- no expert knowledge needed.

It only takes a few minutes at www.implosionworld.com, watching videos of real controlled demolitions, to demolish the idea that they look like the fall of the towers. There are plenty of videos there; the detonations are visible, and in none of them is there a top-to-bottom firing sequence, carried out while the building is collapsing. The pattern generally appears to be one of near-simultaneity- the idea being, apparently, to break down the building's structural integrity and then rely on gravity to know which way to pull.

You can also, in one video, get a look at a bit of the interior of a building which has been prepared for demolition, and wonder how on Earth it would be possible to do that in an active office building without anyone noticing things like concrete broken away to give access to steel, wires and suchlike running all over the place, etc.

There's also a page that contrasts the methods used to "fail" reinforced concrete columns (remarkably similar to the blasting methods used in the silver mines of the Comstock lode over a century ago) and the charges used to cut steel structural members. Then you can watch a video of a bridge demolition, with the flashes of the steel-cutting charges brilliantly visible, consider that a considerable part of the WTC towers' support came from exterior columns completely exposed to view, and wonder where the Hell are the signs of charges going off on those columns.

Nevertheless, the woowoos will try to have you believe that merely dumping a duffel bag of explosives in the general vicinity of a steel structural part will do the job.

#2 is based on- well, I'm not sure what, besides a stubborn unwillingness to credit the idea that determined terrorists could learn enough about controlling an airplane to smash it into an exposed building and then take over an airplane and do just that, a determination to pin the crime on the powers that be and a willingness to indulge in technical, organizational, psychological and dramaturgical horespuckey.

I swear, if there weren't a jillion eyewitnesses and plenty of film and photos to prove it, these birds would be claiming that there weren't any airplanes involved at all.

jj wrote:
True, however, the steel in the WTC didn't need to melt, and I haven't seen any evidence it did. (Bear in mind I used to live 25 miles west of it)

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I'm not sure this argument will sway those conspiracy nuts who lived closer to the WTC than you did.

I swear, if there weren't a jillion eyewitnesses and plenty of film and photos to prove it, these birds would be claiming that there weren't any airplanes involved at all.

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One does not have to search very far to find conspiracists who maintain that no airplane crashed into the Pentagon.

jj said:

All that had to happen was to make the steel more plastic, by affecting the grain structure, which starts to happen at temperatures just slightly above boiling.

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I assume you mean temperatures just slightly above the boiling point of water, not temperatures just slightly above the boiling point of steel!