Originally posted by: Acanthus
Read the part about the fires, where an MIT Prof concludes that the temperature of the fires exceeded 1000C.
i really want to read the entire book, but dont have time, so i pulled this part, the actual part you just mentioned.
Wierzbicki follows with a detailed analysis of the collision of the aircraft, and the heavy damage that they caused to the structures. From his exacting mechanical analysis, he concludes that the North Tower must have lost between 4 and 12 core columns ¾out of 44¾ while the South Tower lost between 7 and 20 such columns, and that both were brought to the verge of collapse by the collisions. Ghoniem examines carefully the fire conditions inside the towers, and determines that the temperature within the buildings must have been close to 1000°C, hot enough to significantly lower the stiffness and strength of the steel columns and girders. He also demonstrates that the chemical power of the aircraft fuel together with the combustible materials in the building, when released as heat over the course of one hour, was a staggering one gigawatt, which is comparable to the power of a large electrical power plant. This provides substantiation to the notion that the fires played a critical role in the collapse of the towers. Buyukozturk and Ulm proceed with a materials and structures analysis of the towers, their interaction with the fires, the effects of these on the structural materials, and the mechanics of collapse. They also discuss how the vulnerability of future high rise buildings could be ameliorated by the widespread application of the concept of ?redundancies?.