reply to post by The All Seeing I
Ah, the sulfur source to sulfide the iron and lower its melting point. I have not estimated the weight of plasterboard in the building or on the
impact floors, but I imagine that both numbers were significant. A 4x8 sheet of half-inch has about 70 pounds of CaSO4.2H20. That means each sheet has
about 13 pounds of sulfur in it. The question is, how do we get to sulfide in steel from sulfate in plaster? The answer is obviously that the sulfate
is reduced to sulfide or sulfur in the fires. The reducing agent is carbon, in the form of partially combusted fuel and office furnishings. Likely CO
is a culprit but, at those temperatures, so is every other carbonaceous specie, including paper. Gravimetric analyses using sulfates were fraught with
error if the ashing of filter paper in the crucible was oxygen poor and the sulfates were reduced to sulfides. Simple chemistry gets us sulfides, as
does the burning jet fuel.
How do we get scatter and contact with the steel? Drop a sheet of plasterboard, sometime, and note the dust. Now hit it with an airplane at 400+ mph.
Dust everywhere from hundreds of sheets of plaster board. What else might the airplane do? Strip the remaining structure to its skeleton, exposing
steel, while igniting its fuel.
Bare steel, sulfate dust, reducing conditions, and heat allow the formation of sulfides in steel. It is also possible that elemental sulfur was formed
and, as a vapor above 445 C, would have access to react with any exposed steel above that temperature and would condense as a hot liquid on steel
below that temperature where it could also react.
Who needs tons of thermite and Byzantine conspiracies when you have one of the biggest non-nuclear cruise missiles in the world to do the job?
