The Titanic sinking conspiracy theory
- Thread starter lub0
- Start date
Oh ta very much
Let's swap over to my favourite conspiracy. Did we know about pearl harbour upfront, but neglect to tell the americans as we knew we needed them to join us in the war?
No direct experience of thermite welding, but I've seen film of it being used to weld railway track. The iron in the thermite becomes part of the joint, as you'd expect, by using a ceramic 'mould' for want of a better word, the speed with which a useable trackway could be created was quite staggering. No shaping of the finished join was required - just clamp the mould, fill, ignite, move on. The film I saw was on TV, I'll see if I can find something similar online.
My best guess for the reasons for thermite welding in large scale construction would be speed and uniformity.
They use it (or at least used to) for joining railway tracks - a mould is made around the joint & a crucible full of Thermite is ignited above it. The resulting reaction causes molten iron to flow into the gap thus creating the weld.
Advantages? Needs no electricity or gas, I suppose. Cheap and effective. The chemicals themselves are fairly difficult to get going so storage/transport might be less of an issue
One of the theories that i read, is that Churchill encouraged the japs to attack. He also was the one who had the lusitania be sat where she was when she was torpedoed. He was chief of the navy or some such at the time and knew full well there were uboats in the area. Apparently it was him who had the munitions loaded onto it aswell.
All theory like.
All theory like.
The coincidence i was referring to was the building collapsing a few seconds after the explosions were heard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uxsFglz2ig
Ignore what I said above about shaping though - that was obviously omitted from the TV program as there's an apparent slice mechanism and grinding to follow the thermite weld for a trackway. Not sure the same would follow for a structure where the joint will be hidden and not rolled along. Still fast though eh?
So what your saying is - Swiss railway workers blew up the twin towers!?!?
Not only that they did it listening to mika!!!!! the horror THE HORROR!
It all makes sense now - even the latest SAK has a tool for applying thermite.... the neutrality was to lull us into a false sense of security....
I doubt it - as chemically you're left with iron, or steel depending on the exact composition of the oxides in the mixture, in the weld. The Al powder is only there as a reducing agent. You should be able to fine tune your weld to more or less exactly imitate the substance being welded.
That said, if the expansion qualities aren't the same between girder/strut/whatever and the weld then there would be tremendous stresses in the event of a hot enough fire. Enough to cause fractures and failure - who knows?
Again the elevators (possibly)? Cables snapping? I don't really know; but I do know that witnesses of a disaste are notoriously unreliable. Ironic as it seems when still taking courses (in aircraft accident investigation) we were taught to generally disregard witness accounts; particularly if the witness had a working knowledge of aviation.
I wish I had more time for it.
Again, not wanting to get drawn into the whole conspiracy/anti-conspiracy thing, I think that the classic thermite reaction on any large scale isn't very likely. The reaction requires substantial quantities of iron oxide, from which the aluminium takes the oxygen, and I don't think that there would be enough even on a very rusty steel beam to do any serious damage to it no matter how much molten aluminium you poured over it.
Having said that, there were thousands of tonnes of goodness-knows-what materials in a skyscraper and hundreds of tonnes of aluminium, magnesium, fuel, luggage, cargo and of course people hitting it at several hundred miles per hour resulting in a very big fire. It would be surprising if all sorts of chemical reactions that haven't been researched didn't happen.
You don't have to melt steel to weaken it substantially, you just have to heat it until it's almost glowing. I've worked with steel a lot. I routinely bend steel in my workshop using my muscles by heating it with a flame which is not capable of melting it. If you heat it until it's glowing brightly you've usually overdone it, the bend becomes difficult to control and tends to happen all in one place which you don't usually want because you want a bend to be smooth and gentle for maximum strength.
If there are welds in an area where the steel starts to buckle they will probably break. It takes an awful lot of energy to break a big weld in steel by deforming it, for example enough energy to throw the joined components ten metres into the air, whether they weigh a few kilos or a few tonnes. When the weld breaks the energy stored in the components in tension and torsion is released very quickly. It sounds a bit like an explosion. I've done that sort of thing myself many times to break welds, and it still sometimes makes me jump when it finally lets go.
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