Democratic Underground - Even NIST doesn't dismisses some of Bazant and Zhou's paper...

Steven Jones? Of which Bazant spoke in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics when he said:

Although everyone is certainly entitled to express his or her opinion on any
issue of concern, interested lay critics should realize that, in order to help discern the truth about an engineering problem such as the WTC collapse, it is necessary to expend the effort to become acquainted with the relevant material from an appropriate textbook on structural mechanics.

Adherence to this principle would lead to more intelligent science-based discourse, and it would preclude the need for everyone to waste time on baseless critiques and unproductive discussions. Of even greater importance, it would avoid misleading and wrongly influencing the public with incorrect information.

The fact that you're quoting from Bazant doesn't speak highly of your knowledge concerning his work. Concerning the paper from Bazant and Zhou, even NIST rejects some of it. However, Steven Jones did say one positive thing about it. Again from his "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" paper:

11. One attendee to the BYU Seminar on 9-11 anomalies suggested I review the paper by Bazant and Zhou, which I did. Quoting:

The 110-story towers of the World Trade Center were designed to withstand as a whole the forces caused by a horizontal impact of a large commercial aircraft. So why did a total collapse occur? ( Bazant and Zhou, 2002, p. 2. )

Correct — jet collisions did not cause collapses — we can agree on that. MIT’s Thomas Eager also concurs “because the number of columns lost on the initial impact was not large and the loads were shifted to remaining columns in this highly redundant structure” (Eager and Musso, 2001).

After this one positive comment, however, he finds that the article has much to answer for:
We continue with Bazant & Zhou:

The conflagration, caused by the aircraft fuel spilled into the structure, causes the steel of the columns to be exposed to sustained temperatures apparently exceeding 800oC… ( Bazant and Zhou, 2002, p. 2. )

But here we note from the recent NIST report that: “The initial jet fuel fires themselves lasted at most a few minutes” and office material fires would burn out within about 20 minutes in a given location. (NIST, 2005; p. 179, emphasis added.) Certainly jet fuel burning was not enough to raise steel to sustained temperatures above 800oC. But we continue:

Once more than half of the columns in the critical floor.. suffer buckling (stage 3), the weight of the upper part of the structure above this floor can no longer be supported, and so the upper part starts falling down onto the lower part below…”( Bazant and Zhou, 2002, p. 2. )

Bazant & Zhou do not explain how “more than half of the columns in the critical floor suffer buckling” at the same time to precipitate the complete and nearly symmetrical collapse observed. There were 47 huge steel core columns in each Tower, and 24 such support columns in WTC 7 (NIST 2005; NISTb, 2005).

They do NOT explain how steel-column temperatures above 800oC were achieved near-simultaneously due to burning office materials. NIST notes that office materials in an area burn for about 15-20 minutes, then are consumed away (NIST, 2005, pp. 117, 179). This is evidently not long enough to raise steel column temperatures above 800oC as required in the Bazant & Zhou model, given the enormous heat sinks of the structures. And to have three buildings completely collapse due to this unlikely mechanism on the same day strains credulity. Moreover, the Final NIST report on the Towers admits:

Of the more than 170 areas examined on 16 perimeter column panels, only three columns had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250ºC… Only two core column specimens had sufficient paint remaining to make such an analysis, and their temperatures did not reach 250 ºC. … Using metallographic analysis, NIST determined that there was no evidence that any of the samples had reached temperatures above 600 ºC. (NIST, 2005, pp. 176-177; emphasis added.)

To be continued...

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