Molten steel under the WTC debris

I watched a program on The History Channel last night about the WTC attacks and the cleanup afterwards. I think it was a new program, at least I hadn't seen it before.

Anyway it specifically mentioned pools of molten steel in the underground parts of the collapsed towers. But the accounts gave conflicting explanations for this. In one part it was said that the jet fuel was the cause, but someone else talked about burning piles of building contents.

But on these forums and elsewhere I have read that neither burning jet fuel nor office debris will burn hot enough to melt steel. Weaken it maybe, but not melt it.

So can anyone offer a plausible explanation for these pockets of molten steel which remained hot for weeks after the attack?

The energy released by the towers collapsing would be a lot. Think about a penny being dropped from 110 floors up. Now imagine a whole building doing that. I do not know if it would be enough to melt the steal, but I could see that happening.

Maybe there is a physicist in the crowd that can answer this.

Videos I have seen show rescuers climbing into the piles of above ground debris right after the collapse. There was no evidence of molten metal there or even hot metal.

Much of the potential energy was dissipated in the pulverization of the concrete and building contents. In fact the show contrasted the Murrah building on Oklahoma City to the WTC. At the Murrah building there were huge chunks of floor slabs and recognizable pieces of office furniture. At the WTC there was little of this, mostly all except the steel was ground to powder.

I watched a special on the minting of coins and they explained that the enourmous pressure created by the die striking the blank actually creates enough heat to melt the blank -- that's how it's able to receive the impression, and why each blank is struck twice: once to heat it up, the second to "mint" the impression.

As for the WTC, it was most likely a combination of the jet fuel, 110 stories of office paper (did you see some of the shots of paper floating on the NY skyline? and have you ever looked around at your own office and noticed the amount of paper in it?) the pressure of the collapse combined with the compact "furnace" which was created when the buildings collapsed.

My 2 cents.

3500 degrees farenheit.

Jet fuel fires that happen when planes crash are extremely hot, terrible things. Where's DemoTex when we need him. He could enlighten you.

The following article from a reputable source says otherwise:

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

"The maximum flame temperature increase for burning hydrocarbons (jet fuel) in air is, thus, about 1,000°C—hardly sufficient to melt steel at 1,500°C."

and

"it is highly unlikely that the steel at the WTC experienced temperatures above the 750–800°C range. All reports that the steel melted at 1,500°C are using imprecise terminology at best."

Perhaps it was wrong. Here's a link to an article published Sept 20, 2001 that gives that figure. http://www.dailyillini.com/sep01/sep20/news/stories/news_story02.shtml

So I guess there are competing claims, and I'm not personally interested in doing more research on this.

I think that claims that the buildings were somehow wired with explosives is laughable. Think real hard about how long that kind of thing would have taken, and then think real hard how likely it is that the work could have been done and NO ONE ever noticed.

Last night there was a three hour episode on American Experience about the World Trade Center. It was begun a year or two before 911, and described in great detail how the thin steel exoskeleton would have been more vulnerable to collapse after a hit by large, fuel-filled airplanes. One of the people interviewed was very sad that they'd never considered such a strike, and especially never considered what all that burning jet fuel would do.

In fact I don't see how explosives would explain molten metal.

I was just curious as to what would cause molten metal in such quantities that it took weeks for these hot spots to cool down.

M. Atta (or one of his sidekicks) snuck down into the bowels of the WTC, after they climbed out of the "Big Bird", and started a fire. What's the big deal about a little molten steel?

It also could have been the result of a spontaneous combustion...caused by terrusts, of course.

In other words, anything but the obvious: explosives set off by unknown parties or Patsies.

I would think that explosives would shatter, not melt steel.

they forgot their copies of the Koran and "Jet Airliner Kamikazes for Dummies" in the car at the airport in Boston. They had planned to use those as kindling for the fires they would start to melt the steel after they snuck down to the basement. So instead, they just had to melt it by holding up a Zippo lighter.

Atta lost his passport on the way down to the basement, BTW.

Structural steel melts at 2500F. I doubt impact and pressure could do that. Also consider: This was an oxygen-starved environment; there were pockets in the debris; the WTC air conditioning coolant tanks were on the sub-basement level. This leads me to believe that the steel would have had to become molten before the structure collapsed, thus insulating the metal in its molten state.

Almost 12 weeks after the terrorist atrocity at New York's World Trade Center, there is at least one fire still burning in the rubble - it is the longest-burning structural fire in history.
<snip>
Tinsley says there are several reasons for the longevity of the fire: "First, this is not a typical fire by any means. The combustible debris is mixed with twisted steel in a mass that covers 17 acres, and may be 50 metres deep. This is the one all future fire scenes will be measured against."
http://journals.iranscience.net:800/www.newscientist.com/www.newscientist.com/hottopics/usterror/usterror.jsp@id=ns99991634

On the morning of September 30, two thousand gallons of PYROCOOL FEF was delivered to the Liberty Sector Command Post at Liberty and West Streets, adjacent to the West side of what was the North Tower. Staging operations were coordinated by WTC Incident Command and FDNY Research and Development (R&D) that would apply PYROCOOL to two areas of immediate concern - the debris field on the West side of the North Tower and the backside of the debris field of the Federal Building (No. Seven). For the Building Seven operation, a 75-foot ladder tower (Truck Company 133-Brooklyn) was utilized, together with a 500 GPM Akron eductor. Foam was applied, at approximately 500 GPM, for two hours to the middle section of Building Seven, after which a portable infrared camera revealed that the area had been fully extinguished. In fact, no hot spots were found in the area where PYROCOOL had been applied.
http://www.pyrocool.org/news.htm

Both PYROCOOL A® and PYROCOOL® FEF are of such structure that each will absorb a photon, elevate to an excited state, and revert to the ground state within a period of 10-3 to 10-6 seconds. Additionally, PYROCOOL® FEF will provide a foam blanket or aqueous barrier that will suppress the flood of volatile organic vapors into the air, thus eliminating flashback of the fire into areas that have already been extinguished by the primary mechanism."
http://www.pyrocool.org/how_it_works.htm

The longest-burning fire on earth, in southeastern Australia, is thought to have been started by a lightning strike 2,000 years ago and is slowly eating away at a buried coal deposit. In Centralia, Pa., a fire that began in a landfill in 1962 spread to old coal mines and has been burning ever since.
"When you have a huge mass of materials deeply buried like this, it's sort of analogous to the Centralia mine fire," said Dr. Thomas J. Ohlemiller, a chemical engineer and fire expert at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. "Very little heat is lost, so the reaction can keep going at relatively low temperatures, provided you have a weak supply of oxygen coming through the debris."
In September, several government and private experts offered various proposals to help curb the fire, including the use of foams commonly employed to fight underground fires in oil fields and of hand-held heat- sensing instruments to track hot spots. BUT THE CITY TURNED DOWN ALMOST ALL OF THE SUGGESTIONS.
"IT'S FRUSTRATING TO FIND YOURSELF SITTING ON THE SIDELINES WHEN YOU KOW WHAT TO DO," said a federal official.
City fire officials defended their approach, saying they rejected several proposals after deeming them either too dangerous or possibly ineffective.
One idea that was accepted came from a company in Lynchburg, Va., that sold the city about 3,000 gallons of its product Pyrocool, which, when mixed with water, is intended to absorb heat from a fire until the temperature drops below the point of combustion. A total of 750,000 gallons of the diluted Pyrocool was spread over ground zero in late September and early October, at a cost of about $120,000.
Pyrocool's operations director, Eddie Tyler, said the substance had been used to quickly douse thousands of fires worldwide over the past eight years.
When round-the-clock Pyrocool treatment at the trade center WAS STOPPED AFTER A WEEK, Chief Blaich said, there was noticeable progress. But the fires were still burning, in large part because of difficulty in getting the substance down through the debris pile and directly onto hot spots.
In a hot flaming fire, many toxic chemicals are incinerated, with little given off except carbon soot, carbon dioxide, water vapor and other fairly innocuous emissions.
But the RELATIVELY LOW TEMPERATURES OF THE TRADE CENTER FIRES mean that traces of dozens of toxic chemicals and heavy metals are carried into the air, including benzene, a cancer-causing compound released when fuels are burned, and styrene, a gas emitted by burning plastic. At times the chemicals in the air at the site reach dangerous levels, particularly when fire flares up, as it did on Nov. 8.
http://www.wardgriffin.com/fire.htm

As in a stubborn coal mine fire, the combustion taking place deep below the surface is in many places not a fire at all. Instead, oxygen is charring the surfaces of buried fuels in a slow burn more akin to what is seen in the glowing coals of a raked-over campfire. But the scale of the trade center burning is vast, with thousands of plastic computers, acres of flammable carpet, tons of office furniture and steel and reservoirs of hydraulic oil and other fuels piled upon one another.
Steel beams pulled from the debris at times are so hot they are cherry red. Benzene, propylene, styrene and other chemicals generated by the combustion of computers, office products and fuels drift through the air. And at times, plumes of this smoke are still carried across Lower Manhattan, into City Hall, down to Wall Street, and up through TriBeCa, a relentless reminder of that morning on Sept. 11.

The part about the RELATIVELY LOW TEMPERATURES OF THE TRADE CENTER FIRES is being misinterpreted by you. Just prior to that sentence the article was speaking about the incineration of toxins.

In a hot flaming fire, many toxic chemicals are incinerated, with little given off except carbon soot, carbon dioxide, water vapor and other fairly innocuous emissions.

This is an area I know quite a bit about. Most incinerator operate well over 2000 deg F. If some of the steel beams pulled out of the WTC rubble were glowing red hot, then the temps were well over 1000 deg F. Hot enough to melt aluminum and is a relatively low temp compared to incineration temps

Producers are supposed to hire a science editor. The idea of steel becoming molten then remaining molten for weeks seems unbelievable. Perhaps they had the wrong terminology.

fyi

Big difference in melting points.

A Blackbird crash I visited some time ago had various pools of melted metal mixed among the titanium crash debris.

If course, not every ounce of metal in the Blackbird was titanium; similarly, not every ounce of metal in the WTC was steel. I'd vote for sloppiness.

How about a small nuclear bomb? :smoke:

I don't know if it was a small Nuke or not. I wouldn't put it past the Bush Gang though. They are known to love radioactive weapons for every occasion!

The persistance of these hot spots cannot be explained by burning jet fuel, burning office cubicles or burning anything, because they persisted most deep in the rubble where there was no oxygen to burn!

There is a great deal of scientific evidence presented by many authentic websites about the kinds of explosives which were used to destroy the whole 7 building WTC complex. For people who just have a good general science background somewhere in their education, this Sanctuary of the Unbearable Truth is a good place to start

No oxygen? Double D: The collapse zone, including the deepest parts, were full of voids that let air in (and also smoke out) and allowed oxygen to feed the fires. There were also remnants of stairwells and underground mechanical and train equipment tunnels that created air shafts.

Adequate independent photos and video show FDNY deploying hose sreams and using foams for extinguishment. Adequate independent photo and video shows deployment of robotic search devices through aforementioned voids once fires were extinguished.

Pools of molten steel is misnomer. Recovered solidified masses were mostly aluminum. Same type used on fenestrations of WTC. Ample samplings of masses retained at JFK hanger and also distributed to testing and college labs.

People, like those in the History Channel story, often make incorrect assumptions. So even though they said "molten steel" it could have been something else. Aluminum is a strong candidate since it's melting point is in the range possible for burning office debris.

I assume that by "fenestrations" you mean the exterior skin of the WTC, the column covers with the windows in between? But wasn't all this above street level and didn't it peel away or shower away in the collapse? Why would significant quantities end up in the underground area of the debris? Did it melt and flow down after the collapse?

From what I can tell the only fires were high up in the impact area, not in the underground area of the WTC. Even these were black smoldering fires not likely to melt even aluminum and were snuffed out in the collapse.

So if the pools of molten metal were aluminum, where exactly did it come from, where was the fire that melted it and what fueled these fires?

Let me remind you of a few things you may be overlooking

1. There were seven underground floors in the WTC towers (70 feet ). This space was filled with debris from the collapse.

2. The towers did not fall straight down. They collapsed slightly off of the footprint. These means any material could have gotten into these sub-floors.

3. The amount of molten metal was never indicated in any information I read, so for all we know it could have been 20 pounds or 20,000 pounds.

4. There are other metals beside aluminum that have lower melting points than steel. Brass and copper are candidates for being able to be melted in these underground fires.

5. Underground fires are not necessarily "cool." They tend to burn with as little excess air as needed to continue, and because they burn in areas that typically have poor heat transfer properties they can get quite hot. Without question hot enough to melt aluminum. Copper and or brass, I'm not sure about. There was plently of materials to fuel these fires as well. Just look around a typical office and nearly all of it is combustable.

was based on accounts that there was molten steel, accounts made by people on the site. The idea that it may have been aluminum, or something else, has been put forward in this discussion but there were no links to sources that I could read.

If it was really steel then nothing I could find would support a mechanism for how this could occur, so that's why I asked.

My feeling at the moment is that this molten metal was probably aluminum and the on-site accounts are the usual mistakes or assumptions people make.

Go to Google.com and search

WTC "molten metal"

or

WTC "molten aluminum"

...or do as the Believers do: see only the stuff where somebody simply reported something erroneously, like in this case most likely the "molten steel" and run around flapping arms and screaming "There couldn't be molten steel!!! Everybody but me is lying about everything!!!!!" or "So there was molten steel!!!! That proves that it was a Soviet Infrared Beam Nuclear Bomb!!!!!"... :-)

So what's your educated opinion or do you just go around with your arms flapping in perpetual mockery?

people on the site." in this case - and as in all other collapse investigations - must be carefully weighed. An everpresent obstacle is sorting through terminologies: generic, slang or local. "Line" to construction hard hat rescue workers was a rope. To firefighters it was a hose. To electrians, a cable. But anything metal was - steel. Sometimes, very rarely - iron. If FDNY uncovered a steel beam or an aluminum column cover as they dug through the rubble they would yell "IRON" to get the Riggers and Ironworkers over. No one yelled "aluminum!"

..and a huge share burned off outside the building in the visible fire balls (cf. FEMA report).
How should the remaining fuel come in the underground parts in few minutes? Would there enough oxygen in the underground parts so that the temperature can rise high enough? No proof for that.
Paper should burn hot enough to melt steel? Is there any proof, any scientific experiment or prior case?

have absolutelly no knowledge about science.
Just look at this:

Don't know if this is enough, but the energy released by the towers collapsing would be a lot. Think about a penny being dropped from 110 floors up. Now imagine a whole building doing that. I do not know if it would be enough to melt the steal, but I could see that happening.
Maybe there is a physicist in the crowd that can answer this.

I LOL-ed when I read this. Is that wrote by a 6-year-old kid?
OMG! ESB-penny association alert!
Imagine - people like these are discussing the WTC collapse!
It is so absurd that they should be arrested by the Stupid Police Department for makind such ridiculous statements.

The planes approaching the towers spent 1/2 of the tank to get there.
Then majority burned instantly in the impact. Then almost all fuel burned in first 5min. (for disinfo's, pardon me, People-With-Vast-Lack-Of-Knowlegde=PWVLOK: Check FEMA report)

Stating that paper and carpets would melt metals is absurd. Come on!
Loizeaux said that and dumped cr*p on himself.
OMG it is so ridiculous...
Not just that starving fire is not melting-hot, but metals will conduct away that heat.


ps: for PWVLOKs: did any of you did any experiments as a kid with fire? No? As I thought.

further to



With all due respect to whatever scientific method, what I have never yet seen is a proof of the assertion, from FEMA or from anywhere else. Is some sort of calculation supposed to substantiate this or is it merely assumed intuitively according to observations of the event?

When I went to school the usual way to melt metals was to burn a carbon based material, coal or oil, e.g. in a blast furnance. One experiment a kid may also for instance conduct would be to melt solder, a feat that may indeed be accomplished by burning wood, paper, parafin or anything similar. One may also care to examine the remains of various objects affected by ordinary house fires.

Do you know what is solder??
An alloy made of lead and tin. Percentage of each are varying (20-97.5% Pb), but common one is Pb:Sn=60:40
At least in Europe.

The highest temperature of melting for this alloy is 327.5°C, which would be Pb:Sn=100:0, meaning pure lead.
Pure lead is easy to melt in an open fire, or even on a big candle flame if you have the patience, lead fits in your melting pot, and you are heating small ammounts.

If you are reffereng to solder wire, then I must say I am surprised.
Will something melt in fire or not depends on lots of things. Not just the melting point.
You have the volume of material, texture of surface, time of exposure to certain temperature, impurrities, temperature of the flame, composition of the flame (yes, that exists too!),....

Comparing solder wire and WTC steel (over inch thick on floors with fire) is not wise.
Your solder is a poor heat conductor, thin (wires also have Nh4Cl+organic compound inside, making them even more thinner) and you'll keep it in fire until you melt it all.

WTC steel was a structural steel. No way to melt in ordinary fires. Absolutely no way. Those smouldering fires had lots of carbon soot in them, so when that kind of flame comes in touch with walls/columns it applies the soot and protects the steel. Fires were not burning on the same spots all the time. They shifted, and suffocated.
Some speak about molten aluminium, too. I say check the maps. Looks like there were extreme piles of aluminium all neatly packed in big metallic pies, ready for suffocating fire to eat them.
Damn it, there were more than a dozen of big puddles, all caught by satellite IC sensors.

Regarding house fires. What is a typical American house made of?
Wood. Not like here in Europe, where people build brick/stone/reinforced concrete houses. Of course you'll have an inferno in a wooden house. I've heard for glass and metal melting. That is a common thing in a wodden house with a lot of windows.
European family houses are remarkably strong in fires. They do not collapse. You don't finish with a pile of coal. You get a sterilized appartment ready for painting. :)

what solder is.

It is a eutectic alloy. i.e. a combination of metals whereby the melting point is lower than either of the combined metals in a purer state.

A typical 60/40 mix of lead and tin for instance has a melting point of as low as 118 degrees centigrade.

The melting points of other combuinations are even lower, e.g. 118 degrees for a 52/48 combination of indium and tin.

See e.g.
http://www.ensil.com/Database/DB-Electronics/DElec-Solder%20Melt.html


Yes, glass is known to melt in house fires. Glass was also known to have melted on 9/11 at the Pentagon, which was not built of wood.

The melting point of 60/40 solder is 186 degrees, not 118 as in my typo.

That's a cool animation, and eutectic mixtures are an interesting phenomenon. You can also think of it as plotting the melting point over an x-y plane that represents the different ratios of the ingredients. The eutectic points represent local minimums on such a plot. And of course you are not just limited to mixtures of two ingredients,

As a kid I was a true mad scientist with a booby-trapped basement lab (set off only once, by my mother). I had an alcohol lamp and a nice big crucible with a handle that I used to melt lead in, making a nice big crucible-shaped lump. Also spent a lot of time making a variety of things that went boom. My favorite was potassium iodide, a very touch-sensitive compound made from iodine and ammonia. Just dropping a piece on the floor would set it off, scattering smaller pieces that would make little crunching noises as you walked on them.

But even with a bunsen burner lead or solder were the only metals I could get to melt - not counting magnesium ribbon, which I spent many happy hours burning.

Based on this intensive hands-on heavy metal exposure I have a good sense of what it takes to melt various metals. It's true that hydrocarbon fuels will do the job, but only if well mixed with the right amount of air. As anyone who has played with gas motors knows, getting the right mixture in the right place at the right time is not a trivial accomplishment. To suggest that you could generate such temperatures by smashing a container of fuel against a building indicates not enough physics and too much exposure to action movies.

In the real world engineering is governed by the gods of FUBAR: if you try to get a complicated system to behave in some predetermined way you will first experience all the other possible outcomes and all the ways it can avoid the outcome you want. This is just the opposite of action movie physics, where for example a machine gun bouncing down a flight of stairs manages to go off at just the right moments to kill all the bad guys. In the real world the opposite would be safer to bet on, but most likely it just wouldn't go off.

Aluminum in ordinary circumstances is inert because, and only because of the oxide that immediately forms upon an exposed surface.

Aluminum is otherwise a remarkably reactive element, prone to react with other substances as well as with atmospherical oxygen. It is added to rocket fuel precisely because of the tremendous heat it thereby generates.

So what then happens when the metal disintegrates because of an extraordinary sudden impact?

While unqualified to pretend to any particualr expertise, I would think it quite likely that a great deal of heat would be generated, and possibly with extra chain reactions involved.

:nuke:

As you say, if you try to get a complicated system to behave in some predetermined way you will first experience all the other possible outcomes.

Would the same perhaps apply to trying to crash an aircraft into a building at high speed without melting metal?

:spank:

that you could generate such temperatures by smashing a container of fuel against a building that has studied the collapse in any detail?

I'm fairly certain that most people that have looked at the physics of this believe that the molten metal is some alloy that was melted by the underground fires that burned for many weeks. Aluminum is a prime candidate because it has a relatively low melting temperature and was in abundance. Of course real details are very difficult to find, so at best it is an educated guess.