Originally posted by: Babbles
Originally posted by: event8horizon
do u realize what u just said. i really dont think that your a scientist at all when it comes to remarks like this.
babbles said, " The World Trade Center buildings were a mixture of many different materials and under high stress and temperatures you should expect all sort of bizarre composition of resultant materials."
that is about the biggest damn lie on this whole thread. yeah.....ok, we have aluminum and alittle rust and when the wtc towers fell, they combined with some other materials to create nanothermite!! hahaha.....That material that jones et el have studied was created by the hand of man.
Originally posted by: event8horizon
as for my background, its none of your business. as for babbles, who knows if he is what he says he is with such bold blantent lies that he spews.
I stand by what I said and I am not sure how you can even argue against this; I am genuinely confused. As is the nature of a building like the WTC one would expect to find a myriad of materials and when given the situation that the buildings were under, i.e. high stress and heat, you would expect to have various materials formed under those conditions.
I fail to understand how my stating of what I see as patently obvious can be construed as "bold blatant lies."
Furthermore a thermitic reaction is simply ferric oxide + elemental aluminum + heat. These are not any sort of scarce, or otherwise rare, materials and I am sure the WTC had a boatload of iron oxide and aluminum as part of the composition of the building structure.
Again, fundamentally there is a problem with the initial integrity of the sample, i.e. the lack of a clear chain of custody, but for arguments sake let's say those samples are indeed material from the WTC so lets look at the journal article.
I did finally read the entire journal article and I found it much worse than I initially imagined. Basically what they did is what we would call a characterization study; did various qualifying analyses to determine some data to describe the material. There was no true quantification done - which while may be somewhat irrelevant, it would put things into perspective.
A few points that I would like to make about the article:
It was repeatedly mentioned that there was some discussion about if there was elemental iron and/or aluminium or if was in an oxide form. They should have used ICP-MS for elemental determination. Any laboratory doing environmental testing would have and ICP-MS and could have handily determined how much, if any, elemental metals were present. This was not done for whatever reason.
They should have used FT-IR to provide more characterization information. In fact this is a pretty basic characterization technique to used and the fact that they didn't use such a fundamental technique does raise a few eyebrows.
Performing an XRD (X-Ray Diffraction) analysis to look at the crystalline structure would have been appropriate.
Furthermore their infatuation with soaking the samples in MEK (methyl-ethyl ketone) is a bit confusing. Soaking inorganic material (i.e. metallic) in an organic solvent like MEK is pointless - an organic solvent will not dissolve metals or their oxides (well not these oxides). This is crazy basic freshman chemistry here. However what they should have done is if they did want to soak the sample in MEK was to follow it up by GC/MS (Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry) analysis - by the way GC and GC/MS analysis is my area of expertise. Anyhow GC/MS would have given them more insight about the organic composition - if any - of the product. Furthermore it would have provided some clues to determine any potential unknown organic material. There were so obsessed with looking at the inorganic side of things they never bothered to look at organic stuff. . . this makes no sense.
Page 17 Figure 14 notes that their sample may be contaminated due to unexplained errant results however they never bother to investigate would could be causing this??!! That is a bit mind-boggling.
The dimensions of the grains they are working with is more coincidental than intentional in regards to "nano" thermite that they mentioned near the article. Crashing a plane into an amazingly large structure is bound to create various powdered metals. There is where a little bit of quantification would be handy; how many µg or ng of this material is present relative the thousands (if not more) tons of material that were the WTC? You would be looking at a potential amount of material that could cause a thermitic reaction to be so insignificant it would round to zero.
I do want to be honest and upfront in that I am not a materials or structural engineer so there are many, many things I do not know. I do not have a doctorate but I have done analytical chemistry for pushing ten years now with my area of expertise in volatile and semi-volatile organic analyses by GC & GC/MS. I have also done UV-VIS and XRD analyses. I have been a project manager on many studies and have reviewed data generated by HPLC, LC/MS/MS, TGA, DSC, KFT, FTIR . .. and a bunch of other acronyms. My point being just because I am not a technical expert on performing a particular analysis (e.g. SEM or DSC) does not mean I am unable to review and comprehend the resulting data from those analyses.
im glad u read the whole article. i can tell your thinking about things now. i might be able to answer a few of your questions. he found elemental aluminum when conducting the mek experiment. that is a big deal considering an Aluminothermic reaction (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminothermic_reaction).
concerning the MEK experiment:
this is a prof jones post from 911blogger forum:
2. In the section of MEK results in the paper, we state:
" Focusing the electron beam on a region rich in silicon,
located in Fig. (15e), we find silicon and oxygen and very
little else (Fig. 16). Evidently the solvent has disrupted the
matrix holding the various particles, allowing some migra-
tion and separation of the components. This is a significant
result for it means that the aluminum and silicon are not
bound chemically."
In kaolin and other substances which incorporate Al and Si, the Al and Si are bound chemically -- that is, they will NOT separate under the action of a solvent such as MEK. That is why these MEK tests are so significant! WE thought of the possibility of an alumino-silicate early on of course, but then we did the MEK tests and were observed a separation of Al from other elements with this solvent - and this test RULES OUT strictly the notion that the aluminum which migrated is bound in an aluminosilicate.
3. From the paper: " Thus, while some of the aluminum
may be oxidized, there is insufficient oxygen present to ac-
count for all of the aluminum; some of the aluminum must
therefore exist in elemental form in the red material. This is
an important result."
This result also rules out the possibility that the aluminum is present as kaolin. Again, this is why we did the experiment -- to determine whether elemental (not chemically bound) aluminum was present, and it was.
4. Most debunkers overlook the high energy/gram yield of the material -- the DSC results -- along with the formation of iron-aluminum rich spheres. See Figures 20, 23 and 25 and associated text. These results mean that a high-energy-yield and high-temperature reaction occurs upon ignition of this red material. THEY HAVE NOT SHOWN THAT ORDINARY PAINT CAN GIVE SUCH HIGH ENERGY/GRAM ACCOMPANIED BY THE FORMATION OF FE-AL RICH SPHERES, nor can they do it!
concerning your thermite question with the airplane involved. frank greening has actually thought of that too!! TLC linked me a pdf file awhile back. greenings thinking is along the same line as yours. the plane melts and reacts with the rust. but what jones et el have discovered is unreacted nanothermite. sounds fancy but its just the size of the iron oxide that qualifies it as "nanothermite". now if u want to create a theory explaining how this unreacted material was created from many different materials from the wtc then go ahead. i havent seen this idea put out by anyone! get a journal to publish it and you will have a counter arguement to jones et el.
i agree with u concerning the organic part of this material. from the jones et el article(page 26), "The organic component contributes to the rapid gas evolution and explosive nature of these energetic superthermites when dry [24]." he is not talking specifically about his samples but of known nanothermites.
and this from page 27 concerning the "organics" of known nanothermites:
"It is striking that some of the red/gray chips release more
energy in kJ/g than does ordinary thermite, as shown in the
blue bar graphs above. The theoretical maximum for thermite
is 3.9 kJ/g [27]. We suggest that the organic material in
evidence in the red/gray chips is also highly energetic, most
likely producing gas to provide explosive pressure. Again,
conventional thermite is regarded as an incendiary whereas
super-thermite, which may include organic ingredients for
rapid gas generation, is considered a pyrotechnic or explosive
[6, 24]"
thanks for actually reading the paper and asking good questions! ill look through your questions again and see if i can answer anything else. i understand that XRD analysis would also be a good way to check for elemental aluminum if u dont believe the MEK experiment.
