Aluminum/magnesium Alloys Options

[Bill Duke]

Hello...First time posting on this forum. Following, you will find a post from 7/6/08's CD article about WTC 7 and the new NIST report. Since I am not a metalurgist or a chemical engineer of any sort, I yield to anyone on this site who may have an eplanation. The contention is that the 747's body parts are composed of an aluminum/magnesium alloy that under conditions of proper combustion as in the crashes at the WTC, become highly flammable and reach temps of 4000 degrees. Here's the post....any feedback will be greatly appreciated...



Hi ~GDE~. I was an aircraft crash investigaor and worked directly for the SAC IG for five years. Crash investigations are always conducted when the cause of an aircraft crash is “not known”. There were very few pieces of aircraft left to investigate at the crash site of the WTC. Just a few scraps.

In addition, video evidence of exactly how the crashes occurred was readily available and there was no doubt as to the cause of the crashes.

Another person asked about melting steel, as burning jet fuel will not melt steel. That is true\, it will cause stteel to warp or bend out of shape after an hour of fire. What is also true is, aircraft aluminum is a mixture of aluminum and MAGNESIUM and it will burn at temps approaching 4,000 degrees, which is more than hot enough to melt steel beams.

The two aircraft were almost fully loaded with tons of fuel, which exploded on impact and the resulting fires were not accessable to firemen and auto sprinkers on those floors were wiped out by the crashes and they wouldn’t have helped with a fuel and magnesium fire anyway. No firemen ever got onto the floors where the aircraft entered.

There were tons of “smushed”, into a compacted mass of burning aircraft, wedged right up into the buildings central cores. The heat would have been near 4,000 degrees at those locations. That is where the building floors were attached, and the heat went right up the center of the buildings, like giant chimneys.

There are also some other aircraft parts, such as the large landing gear wheels, which are solid magnesium, and once magnesium, or magnesium aluminum alloys are afire, they cannot be put out, except by burying them in sand or smothering with foam. Water on magnesium fires will cause it to explode.

Military aircraft generally have more magnesium than commercial airliners, but there was tons of magnesium in those 767s which struck the two towers. Later mdels ahve less magnesium. A fact which has been ignored in all of the official reports about the 9-11 disaster. It should not have been ignored.

[dMz]

Also from that Wiki aluminum alloy link above:

"Aluminium's intolerance to high temperatures has not precluded its use in rocketry; even for use in constructing combustion chambers where gases can reach 3500 K. The Agena upper stage engine used a regeneratively cooled aluminium design for some parts of the nozzle, including the thermally critical throat region; in fact the extremely high thermal conductivity of aluminium prevented the throat from reaching the melting point even under massive heat flux, resulting in a reliable lightweight component."

3500 K is 3226.85 C or 5840.33 F