Keith McConnell of London, UK wrote:
I belive your argument about the failure due to fire to be fundamentall flawed, as any engineer worth his salt will tell you. It is true that aviation fuel doesn't brun high enough to melt the steel, but the steel didn't fail through melting it failed through creep. Creep rates in metals becomes significant at 0.3Tm (where Tm is the melting point) using your own figures and a very rough conversion to degrees Kelvin ( as used in the creep calculations) the temperature at which aviation fuel burns is about 0.6Tm. This allready puts it well over the level at which crrep becomes significant, but if we also consider that creep rate has a power law relationship, and increases exponentianlly with temperature it is easy to see that creep can cause the failure of the building. The assertation that now skyscrapper has failed due to fire before is also true, but aviation fuel burns at much higer temperatures than a conventional fire would and so no skyscrapper had ever been subjected to such high creep rates before. This raises (in my mind atleast) some important points. Firstly, you haven't fully understood the failure mechanism, yet you still state with absolute authority that it couldn't happen. This cast serious doubts over your research and would lead me to take everything presented here with a pinch of salt, afterall, if you got this wrong, what else might you have gotten wrong. More worringly perhaps, you deliberatly misrepresented the facts, peddled half truths (the best knid of lies) on the assumption that most people won't be able to find th flaws. I sincerely hope it is the first rather than the second.