Senior Research Scientist Proves that Planes and Fires Caused Collapse, page 1

I'm not going to go through all of that point by point, but I'll outline the major flaws. It makes a lot of the same faulty assumptions that NIST does, and thus, no new ground is really covered here.

A quick skim will show that the paper is obviously geared around justifying the official story, much in the same way that the NIST Report was.

For examples,

Page 5 of the paper says,

We note in concluding this Section that the values for tc given above represent the calculated values for the time of collapse of the WTC towers neglecting the energy required to crush or otherwise destroy the support structure of each floor. This energy, which we will call E1, is considered in detail in Section 4.2. For now it is sufficient to note that the collapse times calculated without allowing for E1 are already in reasonable agreement with the observed collapse times. This suggests that E1 is relatively small compared to the kinetic energy associated with the falling blocks of floors;

So, in other words:

The time it would've taken for the floors to fall with no resistance is already approaching the total amount of time it took the towers to fall, so then they assume that, therefore, there was not much resistance from the structure! Now, that's bias at best. At worst, they're doing something pretty much equivalent to lying outright, if not worse.

When the time it would've taken the building to fall without resistance (which is something that WCIP has already figured up in a past thread and nothing new anyway) is already about the total collapse time, that's bad for you guys. It means they're assuming that all that steel and concrete and etc. just gave way really easily without really slowing down the collapse of 13 floors (for WTC1). And they're putting on in this paper as if that can be expected, simply beacuse the collapses, without resistance, already took a long assed time in relation to the actual collapse times.

And the following conclusion, reached on page 8, is totally disconnected from the reality of the event:

A comparison of these Q values with the initial kinetic energies, Ti (WTC 1) and Ti (WTC 2), shows that a relatively small fraction of the available energy, (6.7 % for WTC 1 and 3.3 % for WTC 2), is converted to heat by the first impact of the upper blocks of floors. Because the fractional conversion of energy to heat is even smaller for subsequent impacts, a rapid self-sustaining total collapse of the towers is an inevitable consequence of first order momentum transfer theory.

Note that this is their explanation to the towers being able to continue falling the whole time.

Four problems with this that make it irrelevant, and wrong (just as this conclusion has ALWAYS been wrong, and always will be unless you guys come up with something better):

The impacted floors did not remain intact and become additional driving weight for the collapsing "blocks." They were destroyed and ejected outwards, with an average of around 80% of the mass of each floor being ejected outwards radially and thus not adding on to the mass of falling materials at all.
The "blocks" of falling floors broke up and lost their integrities during the collapses, with large chunks falling over the side at various times somewhat early in the collapses.
Because of the above points A and B, it can be assumed, by their own reasoning, that the relative amount of energy lost to heat through each impacting of a floor would be an increasingly large fraction of the total energy available – NOT AN INCREASINGLY SMALL ONE.
The collapse speed did not slow, immediately indicating that (1) absolutely no resistance from the structure, or that (2) explosives (third source of energy) were used to blow out each floor.

So the math these guys are presenting is totally unrealistic and assuming things that did not happen, or leaving out things that did.

Sorry, LeftBehind.

Other more minor, but nonetheless wrong/misleading, points:

From page 3,

For the general case of n floors collapsing we define a collapsing mass Mc :

Mc = n mf ……………………. (1)

where mf is the mass of one WTC floor, assumed to be 1/110 the mass of an entire WTC tower, namely mf = (510,000,000 / 110) kg  4,636,000 kg

This neglects the fact the higher floors became increasingly lighter. No mention of this is made.

Page 16,

"Revised collapse times":

We have re-calculated the descent velocity after the impacts on every floor and determined a revised collapse time that now includes the effects of the energy lost in crushing the support structures.

So now they're going to figure out how much energy would've been lost in destroying all the steel perimeter columns and core columns and trusses, and the concrete, and etc.

A lot more energy exerted to destroy all of those things so thoroughly, into so many small pieces, you would think, in comparison to just falling straight down to the Earth without resistance. It would take a lot of energy away from the actual falling.

Previously (E1 = 0) tc = 12.6 sec

Revised (E1 = 0.6  109 J) tc = 12.8 sec

Yeah, that's right. 0.2 seconds.

An additional 0.2 seconds of WTC1 collapsing was all that was required to actually destroy the buildings, ejecting busted-up material everywhere, radially, out from the footprint. That's a snap of a finger!! And concrete being pulverized into dust while the trusses to hold them in place were having their bolts sheered? And for WTC2, the additional time was apparently half that: 0.1 seconds to destroy all of the steel, concrete, etc., to the state that it was observed in after the collapses. All the while energy is supposedly being lost on each floor, even as they maintain the same velocity? Why do you believe this?

The graph on page 16 suggests that the amount of available energy decreased significantly as the collapse progressed onto thicker columns, and yet in reality no such change in energy was observed.

The graph on page 17 is based upon the flawed reasoning outlined above, that the floors would accumulate and that no mass was lost, etc.

From page 19,

The smoky appearance of the jet fuel fires suggests that the flames
inside each tower were fuel-rich and therefore probably below 850° C.

First let's look at how this guy got "fuel rich." The smoke turned back. That means there was soot, uncombusted hydrocarbons, in the smoke. That means that the fire wasn't combusting all of the hydrocarbons at its disposal, and thus inefficient. This can stem from two things, essentially: too much fuel, or a dying fire. The fires immediately after impact were lighter and then turned black and the jet fuel was burned away, with the plastics and other office supplies being there the whole time. Thus, it logically follows that the fires were not producing black smoke because of a sudden abundance of fuel, but because they were dying.

Now, this does suggest lower temperatures than 850° C, but lower than the author of the paper is going to admit.

From the same page,

In addition, the structural steel was heated indirectly and almost certainly never attained a temperature above 600° C. Nevertheless, some (~ 20 %) loss of strength is to be expected for steel heated to 550° C, a temperature that may have been reached by some WTC core columns.

From information released on the structural integrity of the WTC's core and perimeter columns that this fellow apparently missed, the amount of integrity loss from fire had to have been around 60%. Not 20%. 20% would not cause a floor to fail, quite simply, even when added to the perimeter and core impact damage of less than 13% in either tower (perimeter columns within themselves suffered 13% or less loss in the region, and core columns logically less in percentage given the circumstances, so proportionally averaged together you still get less than 13% in either tower).

From page 20,

The safety factor for collapse of the 80th floor is now only a little over two, but apparently still sufficient to sustain the building almost indefinitely. However, the damage to the twin towers was asymmetric so that the post-impact gravity load above the impacted floor was no longer uniformly distributed.

The obvious problem here is that the buildings did not fall asymmetrically. The buildings tilted some prior to vertical collapse, especially WTC2, but this has physics problems unto itself indicating the the top floors were not using the bottom floors as a fulcrum; there was no connection. WTC1 didn't even have that much going for it when it collapsed, pretty much perfectly symmetrical from the get-go.

Conclusions, page 21,

An analysis of the energetics of the WTC collapse events has shown that the kinetic energy of the aircraft collisions and the subsequent gravitational energy released by the descending blocks of floors were quite sufficient to destroy the twin towers in the manner observed.

Flaws in the reasoning and calculations leading to this conclusion have already been exploited. In addition, the charts they show blatantly ignore the fact that there was no observed loss of energy in either of the WTC collapses.

The times calculated for the collapse of WTC 1 and WTC 2 show good agreement with the observed collapse times verifying the basic assumptions of the momentum transfer model used in the calculations.

As has also been shown, this conclusion was reached after it was assumed that, since unresisted collapses already took up the vast majority of the available time, the resistance *must have* taken very little time. This type of reasoning totally undermines the "possibility" of the resistance greatly affecting collapse times, and is intellectually dishonest to say the least.

The calculated times represent the minimum theoretical times of building collapse. If shorter times are to be physically achieved they must involve an unknown additional source of energy acting in a downward direction. Such a source of energy does not appear to have been involved in the collapse of the twin towers.

Such a source would certainly not appear if one were to constantly look the other way when faced with its probability. At any rate, this conclusion seems to me as if the author is encouraging others to show the collapse times were less than his figures in order to debunk him, when really his whole reasoning on the times he gives is extremely off. A sort of straw man is presented here.

The kinetic energy of the collapse events was sufficient to crush the WTC floor concrete in both towers to particles 100 m in diameter, or smaller, which is consistent with the observed WTC debris particle size distribution.

Without even going into the energy problems with this (which are similar to the energy problems of the rest of the collapse), it's illogical for the concrete to have been so thoroughly crushed to begin with when the trusses holding them in place were having their connecting bolts rapidly sheered off.

From a consideration of the strength of the WTC columns, and the effective area of support they provided, it is demonstrated that the conditions necessary for the initial floor collapse were initiated by the aircraft impact and made irrevocable by the subsequent eccentric loading of the core columns. It is therefore suggested that the total collapse of both towers would have occurred even without the jet fuel fires.

Immediately obvious question: then why did they not fall immediately after impact?

But besides that, in the section where this conclusion is built up and outlined, we come across the following:

Now consider the 80th floor of WTC 2 after the aircraft impact. About 20 % of the support columns have been destroyed and another 10 % may have been buckled to some degree.

This is borderline lying. Firstly, "the support columns" are not further identified as perimeter or core. Secondly, the only available numbers are for the perimeter columns. Those figures are not "[a]bout 20%," but less than 13% in either building as per FEMA. I'm not even sure what figures are being referenced when the author states "another 10 % may have been buckled...", and there are no figures whatsoever for the core columns, of which it's very likely that even less were knocked out in ratio than the perimeter columns.

The author subsequently goes on a theoretical, unsupported journey of imagination as to how the core columns *may* have failed so as to allow collapse that not even NIST will approach. There is one truth to this, though: the fires certainly had nothing to do with the failures.

That covers the bulk of the b.s. presented in that paper. Simply put, it doesn't take everything it needs to into consideration, but looks the other way here and there and makes false assumptions, etc. to get to the desired result, just as the NIST Report does.