WTC Architect & Dr. of Physics at VOXPOP - April 20
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FRIDAY APRIL 20, 6-8 PM at VOX POP
Our regular Vox Pop Friday Night Speakout Series continues with a special guests, on the theme: "Were the World Trade Center Towers Taken Down by Controlled Demolition?"
We welcome a Ph.D. physicist, Terry Morrone, and an original architect of the World Trade Centre Towers, Fred Gutnick, to lead us in a lively group discussion on the topic:
Fred Gutnick is a community activist, and retired architect/engineer with the Port Authority of NY & NJ. Fred served on various airport and other design teams and was extensively involved in the design and construction of the World Trade Center. After the topping out of the North Tower, he'd often spend lunch hours in solitude on its roof while playing his mbira (thumb piano) or harmonica.
Terry Morrone is a long-time peace activist with a PhD in Physics, from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He was Professor Emeritas of Physics at Adelphi University, and has produced five Public Access Shows for Cablevision and Verizon. He was Associate Producer of the anti Vietnam War film, "In the Year of the Pig"
Hosted by John Webber and Mike Pergola,
Vox Pop's Friday Night Free Speak Out
Local and national politics discussed civilly with dinner, drink
and good company.
Some Watch, Most Speak, All Think. The First Amendment gets attacked often but it's defended at THE FRIDAY NIGHT FREE SPEAK OUT
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Would these gents please take a look at a technical paper?
The NIST report is woefully inadequate regarding post collapse initiation, and refers to the Bazant Zhou paper as bolstering their notion of "inevitable global collapse". However, research dating back to 1984 studies the effects of vertical impacts on tall thin plates, in a regime compatible with the Bazant Zhou assumption of an initial free fall equal to a single storey of height h.
The Bazant Zhou paper needs to be corrected to incorporate the dynamic effects studied by Calladine and English: In Calladine and English's experiment, a drop from a height of about .7 h, of a weight equal to about 71x the weight of the steel being impacted, bent but did not break it. The purpose of the CE paper, in part, is to develop scaling rules to validate studying impacts on small scale models.
Calladine, C. R. and English, R. W., "Strain-rate and Inertia Effects in the Collapse of Two Types of Energy-Absorbing Structure", Int. J. Mech. Sci., Vol. 26, No. 11/12, pp. 689-701, 1984.
Summary from the paper:
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The dynamic collapse of energy-absorbing structures is more difficult to understand than the corresponding quasi-static collapse, on account of two effects which may be described as the "strain-rate factor" and the "inertia factor" respectively. The first of these is a material property whereby the yield stress is raised, while the second can affect the collapse mode, etc. It has recently been discovered that structures whose load-deflection curve falls sharply after an initial "peak" are much more "velocity sensitive" than structures whose load-deflection curve is "flat-topped"; that is, when a given amount of energy is delivered by a moving mass, the final deflection depends more strongly on the impact velocity. In this paper we investigate strain-rate and inertia effects in these two types of structure by means of some simple experiments performed in a "drop hammer" testing machine, together with some simple analysis which enables us to give a satisfactory account of the experimental observations. The work is motivated partly by difficulties which occur in small-scale model testing of energy-absorbing structures, on account of the fact that the "strain-rate" and "inertia" factors not only scale differently in general, but also affect the two destinct types of structure differently.
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Question for Architects
A caller to A. Jones asked if Alex was aware of Paul Lafolley's claim that the Towers were loaded during their construction. Your early participant is ripe for cross-questioning.
My take is that it wasn't. And I say this with confidence because of what I learned from Skilling's staff. We know the properties were subjected to a proposal for a "Traditional Demolition," back in 1987.
We know that the project AIA on #7 called his masterpiece: "The buiulding that never should have been built."
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First they ridicule you, then you look for better ways to be entertained!