THE COMING COLLAPSE OF OUR VERTICALLY STRUCTURED SOCIETY

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If the bottom of this card house collapses it all comes down. The house of cards in western society is all based on one single item We are vertically structured which is. The author saw this problem arising over 10 years ago and intentionally migrated to a more horizontally structured society where software and electricity.

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He moved to the South Pacific Island of Vanuatu and includes a number of photos of the freewheeling lifestyle there. He then goes on to present a likely scenario which he is positive will happen in the foreseeable future.

This includes increasing violence and disregard for. The evolution of our vertically structured society has peaked and is on the point of collapsing You will go to bed one evening happy. You will be given absolutely no warning! The author explains what you. It has been written as a short, meaty and high impact book that should take less than 60 minutes to read. It will change the way you think about your. The egg-crate construction made a redundant structure i. Prior to the World Trade Center with its lightweight perimeter tube design, most tall buildings contained huge columns on 5 m centers and contained massive amounts of masonry carrying some of the structural load.

The early news reports noted how well the towers withstood the initial impact of the aircraft; however, when one recognizes that the buildings had more than 1, times the mass of the aircraft and had been designed to resist steady wind loads of 30 times the weight of the aircraft, this ability to withstand the initial impact is hardly surprising. The only individual metal component of the aircraft that is comparable in strength to the box perimeter columns of the WTC is the keel beam at the bottom of the aircraft fuselage.

While the aircraft impact undoubtedly destroyed several columns in the WTC perimeter wall, the number of columns lost on the initial impact was not large and the loads were shifted to remaining columns in this highly redundant structure.

The ensuing fire was clearly the principal cause of the collapse Figure 4. The fire is the most misunderstood part of the WTC collapse. Even today, the media report and many scientists believe that the steel melted.

It is argued that the jet fuel burns very hot, especially with so much fuel present. This is not true.

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Part of the problem is that people including engineers often confuse temperature and heat. While they are related, they are not the same. Thermodynamically, the heat contained in a material is related to the temperature through the heat capacity and the density or mass.

Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation

Temperature is defined as an intensive property, meaning that it does not vary with the quantity of material, while the heat is an extensive property, which does vary with the amount of material. One way to distinguish the two is to note that if a second log is added to the fireplace, the temperature does not double; it stays roughly the same, but the size of the fire or the length of time the fire burns, or a combination of the two, doubles.

Thus, the fact that there were 90, L of jet fuel on a few floors of the WTC does not mean that this was an unusually hot fire. The temperature of the fire at the WTC was not unusual, and it was most definitely not capable of melting steel. In combustion science, there are three basic types of flames, namely, a jet burner, a pre-mixed flame, and a diffuse flame. A jet burner generally involves mixing the fuel and the oxidant in nearly stoichiometric proportions and igniting the mixture in a constant-volume chamber. Since the combustion products cannot expand in the constant-volume chamber, they exit the chamber as a very high velocity, fully combusted, jet.

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This is what occurs in a jet engine, and this is the flame type that generates the most intense heat. In a pre-mixed flame, the same nearly stoichiometric mixture is ignited as it exits a nozzle, under constant pressure conditions. It does not attain the flame velocities of a jet burner. An oxyacetylene torch or a Bunsen burner is a pre-mixed flame. A fireplace flame is a diffuse flame burning in air, as was the WTC fire. Diffuse flames generate the lowest heat intensities of the three flame types. If the fuel and the oxidant start at ambient temperature, a maximum flame temperature can be defined.

This maximum flame temperature is reduced by two-thirds if air is used rather than pure oxygen. The reason is that every molecule of oxygen releases the heat of formation of a molecule of carbon monoxide and a molecule of water. If pure oxygen is used, this heat only needs to heat two molecules carbon monoxide and water , while with air, these two molecules must be heated plus four molecules of nitrogen.

Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation

Thus, burning hydrocarbons in air produces only one-third the temperature increase as burning in pure oxygen because three times as many molecules must be heated when air is used. But it is very difficult to reach this maximum temperature with a diffuse flame. There is nothing to ensure that the fuel and air in a diffuse flame are mixed in the best ratio. Typically, diffuse flames are fuel rich, meaning that the excess fuel molecules, which are unburned, must also be heated.

This fuel-rich diffuse flame can drop the temperature by up to a factor of two again. Some reports suggest that the aluminum from the aircraft ignited, creating very high temperatures. While it is possible to ignite aluminum under special conditions, such conditions are not commonly attained in a hydrocarbon-based diffuse flame.

In addition, the flame would be white hot, like a giant sparkler. There was no evidence of such aluminum ignition, which would have been visible even through the dense soot. It was noted above that the wind load controlled the design allowables.

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The WTC, on this low-wind day, was likely not stressed more than a third of the design allowable, which is roughly one-fifth of the yield strength of the steel. The additional problem was distortion of the steel in the fire. The temperature of the fire was not uniform everywhere, and the temperature on the outside of the box columns was clearly lower than on the side facing the fire. The temperature along the 18 m long joists was certainly not uniform. This produced distortions in the slender structural steel, which resulted in buckling failures.

Thus, the failure of the steel was due to two factors: Nearly every large building has a redundant design that allows for loss of one primary structural member, such as a column. However, when multiple members fail, the shifting loads eventually overstress the adjacent members and the collapse occurs like a row of dominoes falling down.

The perimeter tube design of the WTC was highly redundant. It survived the loss of several exterior columns due to aircraft impact, but the ensuing fire led to other steel failures. With a Pa floor design allowable, each floor should have been able to support approximately 1, t beyond its own weight. The total weight of each tower was about , t. As the joists on one or two of the most heavily burned floors gave way and the outer box columns began to bow outward, the floors above them also fell.

The floor below with its 1, t design capacity could not support the roughly 45, t of ten floors or more above crashing down on these angle clips. This started the domino effect that caused the buildings to collapse within ten seconds, hitting bottom with an estimated speed of km per hour.

There are several points that should be made. First, the building is not solid; it is 95 percent air and, hence, can implode onto itself. Second, there is no lateral load, even the impact of a speeding aircraft, which is sufficient to move the center of gravity one hundred feet to the side such that it is not within the base footprint of the structure. Third, given the near free-fall collapse, there was insufficient time for portions to attain significant lateral velocity.

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