Do you think burning jet fuel can melt steel?

Question

For anyone that doesn't know, jet fuel is kerosene. It is the same thing.

It seems a lot of you still believe the small isolated fires created by jet fuel in the World Trade Center caused both buildings and the one next door (WTC 7) to suffer a 100% structural failure. So, I did a little experiment. I got out my kerosene heater (made of steel - most likely a lower grade steel than used to build the WTC buildings) and put it on the high setting and let it run for hours. I expected to come back and find it had collapsed too. But nope, it hadn't collapsed at all. In fact, it hadn't even melted! Imagine that.

I encourage anyone with a kerosene heater to conduct their own experiment to corraborate my results.

Answer 1

It is the oxygen supply that has the greatest influence on a kerosene fire's heat production.

To demonstrate, get a fan & long extension cord, a metal frying pan and a cup of kerosene. Find yourself an outdoor location where you aren't going to burn down anything important. Pour the kerosene into the frying pan and set it on the ground. Make sure the kerosene container is far away and don't get any on yourself. Light the kerosene on fire and notice how it burns.

Then turn the fan on and blow it at the fire. You will see that the increased air supply makes the fire much bigger and hotter. This is the operative principle. On a large scale such a fire can easily propagate temperatures in the thousands of degrees - hot enough to melt steel.

Answer 2

The jet fuel by itself may not cause an explosion, but there were a lot of flammable items in the building, not to mention mechanical systems that wouldn't react well to jet fuel. And as for the buildings collapsing, I think the intense heat the jet fuel burned at would have been enough to destroy the inside of the building, and once one floor collapsed, the whol thing would have gone down like a house of cards, with each floor causing the one below it to collapse.

There was also an unusual design which was used on the World Trade Center--the steel structure which supported the building wasn't internal, like most buildings--it was an exoskeleton (remember seeing the steel girders from the outside of the building still standing? That was all that was supporting it, so they could have large open areas inside the building). That exoskeleton wasn't designed to take the additional weight of a 747 ramming it in the side and roosting inside it.

I don't remember seeing an actual explosion--there was a fire, then plumes of dust and debris as the towers fell. So I'm not so sure your test was valid.

Answer 3

You don't understand what happened.
The burning jet fuel merely annealed (softened) the steel. (around 1400 degrees). The problem was the weight of the floors above the fire. Had the fire been higher,say one of the top two or three floors, chances are they would have sustained only fire damage and not collapsed. The terrorists understood that they had to take advantage of this fact.
It was not necessary to suffer total structural failure.
I think a better experiment might have been to balance a cold liquorice stick between two cups.While cold it would remain stiff, but as it warms up it would begin to sag. The steel supports probably would have behaved similarly.

I found (crossstichkelly's) answer interesting. Especially about the plane "roosting".

Answer 4

Um, how do you think *any* fire gets hot enough to make steel in the first place??? They use some sort of petroleum based fuel as a starting point, and the temperature in the blast furnace gets up to several 1000 degrees.

ANY flame that is contained in a closed area, where the rate of heat energy IN is greater than the heat energy OUT (i.e. inside the 85th floor of a large office building), will cause the temperature to RISE!!! EVEN to 1500 degrees or more!!! It's simple thermodyanic principles.

Try your experiment in an enclosed, semi-insulated container, and see what happens.

Note: it doesn't take a complete 'melt' of steel to make it weak and plastic-like, either,

.

Answer 5

I encourage YOU to visit a metalworking shop sometime. There, you'll see people beating on pieces of hot steel and easily bending them without having to melt them. Steel is a substance that is prized precisely for its ability to undergo plastic deformation (rather than fracture) in response to stress. Most cold-working of steel occurs at temperatures well below the melting point of steel. So it's perfectly possible for kerosene to have heated the steel to the point where it bent easily under stress and then broke.

Answer 6

Kerosene heaters are purposefully designed to give off heat, not accumulate it. Besides, your heater is designed to burn only a small amount of fuel at a time, so that even on max, the heater does not produce enough heat to melt itself.

The people who designed your heater thought of that. Your experiment is flawed.

Answer 7

Burning jet fuel will cause aluminum to melt and puddle into small ingots. Aluminum is a common metal used in aircraft construction. Steel will not melt because the flame is not hot enough.

Answer 8

it never had to melt anything, learn something about metallurgy, the high temperature would have significantly altered the characteristics and strength of the steel

Answer 9

So, you have proved again that conspiracy nuts, such as yourself, are intellectually deficient. Good job!!!

PS Congrats to just about everyone who answered this question in refutation of the questioners delusions.