Jet fuel is essentially kerosene. If you've ever been camping with a kerosene burner, you know it's not going to melt your stainless steel cookware if you accidentally boil away your water or something. So if you're not afraid to fry an egg on a propane cooker, or fly in a plane without the engine melting, why would you assume fires from jet fuel and otherwise ordinary office fires would cause a massive steel frame building to collapse in on itself?
My answer to that question is, well, I wouldn't assume that. But for the first time in history, ordinary office fires/jet fuel caused 3 massive steel-framed skyscrapers to collapse perfectly into their own footprint. Yet we know there were pools of molten steel at the bottom of the towers for weeks afterward. Droplets of steel spheres were found in the WTC dust (that's how they used to make musket balls in the old days, dropping molten lead from high places). We can actually see the molten metal flowing from the towers in pictures from the collapse:
So if regular office fires don't cause buildings to suddenly collapse, how do you explain this molten steel? Well, thermite burns hot enough to melt steel, and that's exactly what some peer-reviewed scientists who examined the WTC dust think caused the twin towers to collapse (nanothermite).
Trouble with that theory is, cave-dwelling terrorists wouldn't have had access to either the WTC complex itself to apply and coordinate this nanothermite collapse, nor would they have had access to nanothermite itself. So that means someone else was involved. Gee, I wonder who?
3 comments:
The official 9-11 story defies common sense and law of physics!
And WTC7 didn't even have any jet fuel... so no jet fuel required at all. Just a wild, red, goose herring chase!
Kerosene is not a single chemical, it is a family of chemicals. The same way Gasoline is (Petrol for cars, AvGas for piston-driven aircraft).
The Kerosene in your garden shed is quite a weak grade of it (though I'd be willing to bet enough of it burning in a drum would produce extreme heat).
The Kerosene used in Jet Liners is 'Jet-A1', and it is a much higher grade and burns VERY hot - about 2000 degrees Celsius on average in the open air. Jet-A1 fuel fires are very difficult to extinguish and require special foams.
The Kerosene used in missiles and orbital rockets is an even higher grade and even more dangerous.
Bulk reply:
The factual data is surprisingly hard to find, but it's there. You really cannot trust anything you read in a forum or on wikipedia, it needs to come from a reputable source-
Jet-A1 aviation fuel, a *type* of Kerosene (Kerosene, or Kerosine, is a family, not a single chemical), burns at 2000 degrees Celsius.
Carbon steel will liquefy and flow at approximately 1400 degrees Celsius, and will be severely weakened well below that temperature.
I think a lot of the misconception comes from (possibly uneducated) american readers seeing '2000 degrees' and mistakenly thinking this means '2000 F' - about 1000 C - whereas of course it actually means '2000 degrees C'.
Jet-A1/JP8 (same thing) properties:
http://aviationsafetyadvisorygroup.org/projects-initiatives/resource-guide-to-aircraft-fire-fighting-rescue/
http://webserver.dmt.upm.es/~isidoro/dat1/eCombus.pdf
http://papers.sae.org/2012-01-1199/
Shell Aviation if you want to ask them in person:
mailto:aviation-technology@shell.com
767's carry 90,000 litres of Jet-A1:
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/767family/pf/pf_200prod.html
Carbon steel:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/melting-temperature-metals-d_860.html
http://www.suppliersonline.com/research/property/metals/1011.asp
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