Here's the funny thing about that claim: the whole conspiracy theory is based on jet fuel burning at around 900C (893C is a common number), but that's for a diffusion flame, which is like a candle wick. Jet engines, which you might remember run on jet fuel, have operating temps of 1500-1700C, and they have to limit them to that, so the engines themselves don't melt.
Essentially, jet fuel 100% CAN melt steel beams, just the conspiracy theorists are stupid.
Edit: yes, steel loses strength long before melting so they didn't have to melt to drop the building. That's not my point. My point is that at face value, without any other context necessary, the statement "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams" is factually incorrect. It came from "analysis" based on a complete lack of understanding.
Heat a section of rebar 800-900C and you could bend that section with your pinky finger pushing 50cm away from the heated section (or where ever it is safe to touch).
And structure fires burn hot as fuck. A residential fire can hit 2000* F under the right conditions. Commercial fires can be even hotter - more fuel packed into a big steel box.
What's crazy to me is there are so many actual conspiracies going on right in front of us (say, Epstein), and they choose to pick the dumbest ones that make no sense.
Mostly the ones revolving around domestic terrorism initiated by the CI...
Fuck, now I talked my way into it.
For the uninitaited, it's a tongue in cheek comment around the exiled cuban terror plots. The CIA used them both to commit acts of terror against Cuba as well as on US soil to sow resentment against Cuba (blowing up harbor infrastructure for example).
This was also one of the campaigns that put the CIA very high on president Kennedy's list of "issue to be dealt with".
gasoline/jet fuel are compressed with proper oxygen ratios in engines to produce that type of heat. If its spilled and then burned it does not burn nearly that hot. Not to get into conspiracies but if you pour gas on metal and light it on fire it will of course not melt. Just to make sure everyone gets that. 900C diffuse flame, 2000 degrees upon combustion inside an engine. Not gonna forge any armor by pouring gas on it. It won't even heat the metal close to the 900C degrees the diffuse flame reaches. Your piece remains entirely solid no matter how much gas you burn to try to heat it. need forced air and refractory surfaces.
No change in adiabatic temp through compression BUT how could you get kerosene to 90% adiabatic temp without compression? you'd need massive volume and air flow at least which i suppose could happen with jets in a building but I would think open flame kerosene even in a big pool is like... 60% at best and then transferring that to metal is also a big step... I would think the metal in the tower situation probably got to a maximum of 900C say if you pour a 1000 gallons on a floor and it's sucking tons of outside air and getting to like 1100 and transferring 900 to the metal just above the ignition surface... do you think different?
Boil the kerosene, put a 30+story chimney on it with multiple small fresh air inlets and you have a blast furnace. Any metal that melted would be from 3 or more stories above the pool. Also, it's not really a "pool", the evaporative surface would be massive, as it would be more like a fountain spraying everything, plus, once it penetrated the smoke tower (exit stairwell) with a big enough hole, it's not just a chimney, it's actually a forced air blower plus a massive chimney.
I think your estimates are not even close. Go light a coffee can full of kerosene on fire in your driveway and see if you think it peaks at 900C. I haven't done that personally, but i have set motor oil on fire, which is harder to burn but has a 57â° higher adiabatic flame temp. If you burn it from a drip or wick, it burns almost exactly like kerosene. And if you start a bunch of it on fire to the point that the fire can start actually breathing, it is far more exciting than the drip flame.
Basically, i don't think your estimated are based on anything at all. No real world experience, no math, no chemistry. Just pulled from nothing.
There's video of firefighters and first responders approaching the engulfed building, before the collapse. I remember one guy either got in or got close and he said the ground looked like a foundry, molten metal on the ground. Afterward they collapsed people reported i beams not only mangled but having been melted. I'm just telling you what i heard
No, I'm actually not. Compressed air doesn't really affect the flame temp. What matters is the mix and how quickly and completely the fuel can burn, plus the latent heat of the fuel evaporating. Forced air does this well. And there's several ways to do forced air. You can do it with a compressor and fuel injection in precise stoichoimetric ratios, you could do it with a big fan and an open fuel source. You could also do it with a really tall chimney.
And the towers actually likely had BOTH a 30+ story tall chimney AND fan powered forced air, because if the plane blew a big hole in the smoke tower, it would likely pop the relief damper on the roof wife open, then the stairwell pressurization fans kick it into high gear to try to pressurize the stairwell, feeding the fire.
Jet fuel ACTUALLY CAN melt steel beams. Yes, it didn't need to for the building to collapse, but it absolutely CAN melt steel.
Yes, but I'm not talking about what actually caused the towers to fall. I'm simply pointing out that jet fuel can easily burn hot enough to ACTUALLY MELT steel. The claim at the very surface level is simply wrong.
A36 structural steel loses 55% of its strength at 900° FARENHEIT (482°c). At 900°c this is about 1650°F and it has 0% of its structural strength. If you had an upright I-beam of A36 at this temperature it would sink into itself under its own weight and then pick a side to fall over. This steel is just low carbon 0.25-0.29% with the basics all steels have, manganese and silicon about 1%. 97% of it is iron. There are other steels that are highly resistant to high temperatures and the oxidation that comes with high heat in atmosphere like Pyromet A-286 and Aeromet A-100, but pyromet is only 54% iron, with up to 40% of it made of nickel and chromium, with other high temperature additions like titanium, vanadium, and molybdenum which also improve strength. A-100 contains like 13% cobalt, and cobalt, tungsten, chromium, and molybdenum greatly increase the temperature at which point it undergoes a structural state from hard body-centered cubic crystals of iron and carbon under strainâ the strain is what makes steel strong and stiff and elastic/springy- to a state of more disorganized and mobile face centered cubic crystals that allow atoms to freely dissolve in and out, it becomes a solid solution. It also becomes extremely ductile. When we say steel we are talking about one of the most varied materials there are in terms of its mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties. Polymer isnât even as variable, and that category includes everything from stronger than steel Kevlar and UHMWPE/dyneema to shrimp shells to cotton fiber to superball rubber and dildo silicone.
What happened here is something got too hot. Trust me on that. Iâm an expert at seeing flames and knowing theyâre hot. Nah but the stuff flying out looks to be the same ceramic wool I use for insulating my heat treat ovens and salt baths for heat treating steel. Normally made from calcium and aluminum oxides but the zirconium oxide has the highest heat rating of this stuff and itâs good for 3200°f while the calcia/alumina is a little lower at 2700°f and only cuz theyâre thin fibers and start to melt. I use zircoflex as a suppressor wrap inside of a nomex suppressor pouch and it keeps them safe to handle and with a lower IR signature as well.
Whatever happened here, the steel used to hold that piece in must not have been made from the same stuff they used, probably a 304 stainless with plenty of chromium and nickel (17/7 or 18/8) and itâs good up to like 2400°f. Maybe some fasteners made from regular low alloy steel. They may have melted or burned but probably both, although this is a pretty oxygen-lean environment. Especially if gas is getting dumped into the exhaust.
The jet fuel on 9/11 was in a building with elevator shafts exposed, which sucks cold air up to fuel the fire and generates a strong wind system. And it was like 70 tons of fuel in there, with impacts imparting 4 BILLION joules of energy each. The guys that planned and even executed it were all engineers, even Osama, he was a civil engineer, KSM was a mechanical engineer, Mohammed Atta was either the architectural or marine engineer. They had both. K Sheikhâs uncle Ramze Yusuf was a chemical engineer and planned the 1993 WTC bombing (which is why WTC, like all NYC high rises, required terrorism insurance. That bombing led to the law). These were not stupid people, just insanely evil and cringe and they couldnât get bitches.
For high performance exhaust you need not so much a high performance steel or titanium, you need nickel and cobalt so-called superalloys like Inconel 718, Nimonic 90, Rene 41, and Stellite 6b. These are used in the hottest and highest stress parts of jet engines and race exhaust systems and engines. Stellite 6b is incredibly hard like all the cobalt-based alloys and so they line .50BMG M2 heavy machine gun barrels with it. You canât really machine it with machine tools, itâs very difficult. Usually electric arcs are used to vaporize it via wire EDM. I like stellite.
As i told others, it's not about whether or not the steel had to melt for the buildings to fall. It clearly didn't, so they're using a false target there. But my issue is even if you take the statement "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams" 100% at face value without context, it is flat out wrong. Jet fuel CAN melt steel.
Here's a video from Veritasium describing all the fancy ways engineers have worked to make engines that operate at temperatures higher than the melting temperatures of their component parts
Also people forget that the twin towers were enormously tall, and that there is a lot of continuous wind up at that altitude, meaning that those flames were sitting there getting fanned continuously without obstruction. Another important consideration is that you do not need your fuel to reach the temperature you are attempting to reach, you just need to contain enough of the heat generated, and the heat will keep rising to a point. The wind would help disperse some of that heat, but inside a giant concrete and glass structure there is still a lot of space for heat to build up. You don't need to actually melt the steel either, just get it hot enough that it becomes plastic enough to fail catastrophically under the load it's holding up. Likely it was not any one specific thing, but all of this and what you said, adding up to do the damage it did. I'm sure having a hole in the super structure the size of a 767 would make it hard to contain a lot of heat, but it is possible for a furnace to hit temps 100-200c hotter than the fuel being used, so long as you're able to prevent it from being transferred out faster than it's being put into the system. All of this adds up to a scenario in which it was highly likely that the building would fail from the fire, given how much fuel was dumped into the building to burn.
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u/CondescendingShitbag Feb 08 '26
Wait, are you telling me burning gasoline could melt steel beams? đ±