Asbestos would have saved the twin towers

Axe_meister

The burn temperature at the turbine is about 1500 put that is in perfect conditions. 
BTW the melting temperature of the turbine is only 1200. Some pretty cool (and simple) cooling methods to stop them melting

ICBM

Reverend said:

Jet fuel can burn at up to 1500.

No, just under 1000ºC. It can reach higher temperatures in an engine but not in normal air.

Reverend said:

Both the places and and the outside of the twin towers were made of aluminium. Aluminum burns at 4100 degrees. WOuld that not be more than enough to do some serious damage?

It never caught fire - you'd have seen intense white flames, and huge clouds of white smoke. It's actually quite difficult to ignite aluminium, normally you need a magnesium ribbon or some sort of hot-burning chemical.

Reverend said:

Did the building codes in New York specify the ability to resist impact from a passenger airline of the sort first flown almost a decade after the the Twin Towers were first designed?

The code specified a Boeing 707, which although the largest jet airliner when the towers were originally designed is slightly smaller than the 767 and carries a smaller fuel load. It's debatable if the towers would have survived that either though. Basically it just wasn't possible to fight such a serious fire that high up.

Steffo

The main issue with the TT fires was that the escape routes were compromised and people couldn't get out. Any building is pretty much doomed as extinguishing fire of that magnitude is an almost impossible task at that height.

Reverend

menamestom said:

 

Reverend said:

A couple of things I have pondered. 

Asbestos is an umbrella term for a group of minerals with melting points between 1200 and 1500 degrees. Jet fuel can burn at up to 1500. Presumably between the melting and impact the asbestos could well have been rendered useless?

Possibly, but the actual temperature of the fire from the Jet fuel was probably less that 1500 degrees.  There are different types of fire depending on a few factors and just using a figure of 1500 is abstract and relies on too many assumptions, it was probably quite a bit lower than that.

This is an interesting read on the subject:-

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0112/eagar/eagar-0112.html

Thanks. That answers all of my questions and this seems to be the key factor.

"No designer of the WTC anticipated, nor should have anticipated, a 90,000 L Molotov cocktail on one of the building floors. Skyscrapers are designed to support themselves for three hours in a fire even if the sprinkler system fails to operate. This time should be long enough to evacuate the occupants. The WTC towers lasted for one to two hours—less than the design life, but only because the fire fuel load was so large. No normal office fires would fill 4,000 square meters of floor space in the seconds in which the WTC fire developed."

paulads

such an awful event