North Tower Acceleration

[William Seger]

122. That has NOT been done

> "It shows that there was about 31 times more energy available than was necessary to push the columns through elastic deformation and into inelastic deformation,"

> No, it does not, and no there wasn't.

That's exactly what the calculation shows, and your pretense of contradicting a leading theoretical structural engineer with nothing but naked assertion and imaginary physics would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic. Your arguments by assertion are getting tiresome. If that's all you've got, maybe you should stop and consider WHY you can't actually support any of the nonsense you're dumping all over the board.

> "Anyone who wants to challenge Bazant's conclusion must do exactly one thing: Show that the structure should have been able to absorb the gravitational energy of the falling mass."

> This has already been done. First by engineers who design steel-framed highrises, second by those who point out the flaws in Bazant's analysis. Gordon Ross is one of them. Where has his analysis been shown to be flawed and by whom?

Utter bullshit again. Nothing of the sort has been done by any qualified person, and "truthers" pretending to do so with imaginary physics and naked assertion don't even begin to count. In fact, if you know of any serious attempt besides Ross' then you really need to reference them, for a change. As for Ross, there were several minor problems with Ross' analysis that were noticed almost immediately, such as the fact that the columns were not continuous pieces of steel, and the joints every three stories would have caused some reflection of the elastic strain waves, so his strain propagation model was flawed. But the analysis lost any credibility when it was discovered that his "energy balance" had counted some energy twice: He had one line item for the energy lost in the inelastic collision and another line item for the energy required to fracture concrete. But those are the same thing: The energy lost in the inelastic collision IS the energy that breaks and deforms stuff. That's WHY it's lost, and that's the only energy available to do that work. With just that one error corrected, Ross' "energy deficiency" disappears. Some people hoped that Ross could re-do the analysis and find another "deficiency" but that entire enterprise seems to have come to an end when Bazant himself pointed out something that should have caused Ross the mechanical engineer to smack himself in the forehead at his own stupidity: A column cannot transmit more force than it takes to fail the column. It's like trying to push a car with a soda straw: No matter how much force you apply, and no matter if you do it slowly or quickly, the maximum force transmitted to the car is the force present just before the straw collapses. That meant that Ross' huge transfer of momentum through those failing columns was almost entirely imaginary, and Ross went MIA immediately thereafter.

Please don't bother responding if all you've got to say for yourself is "no it didn't." That's a pointless waste of time and bandwidth.