by Mike Bondi, P.Eng.

Dr. Robert Korol, professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, has led a team of academic researchers in preparing two peer-reviewed scientific papers on the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7. Both papers were published in the Challenge Journal of Structural Mechanics — the first one in July 2015, the second in February 2016.

Prior to publishing these papers, the team of researchers carefully reviewed the work of Zdeněk Bažant, a professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science at Northwestern University, who had published a paper shortly after 9/11 focusing on the collapses of WTC 1 and 2. Entitled “Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse?—Simple Analysis,” Bažant’s paper presented “a simplified approximate analysis of the overall collapse of the towers of World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001.”

Noting the many shortcomings in Bažant's analysis, which have been studied and criticized extensively since 2001, Korol and his colleagues set out to apply a much more rigorous methodology for analyzing WTC 7, which, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), collapsed from normal office fires. As Korol explains, “WTC 7 is a particularly useful example, because there isn't the concern about trying to predict the amount of heat generated by spewing jet fuel and having it ignited within a building. It's the materials within the building that generate the heat release.”

The greater certainty about the material properties involved would allow the team to evaluate whether WTC 7 could have collapsed as a result of burning materials being ejected from WTC 1 and igniting fires on the 12th and 13th floors. The team’s analysis eventually led them to conclude that even with very high estimates for the amount of combustible materials present in office buildings — using the maximum amounts allowed in the building codes — and making many other generous assumptions, such as having two floors “totally ablaze with raging inferno fires,” WTC 7 still would not collapse. NIST could not have been correct in claiming that such a failure mechanism could have resulted in the collapse.

http://www.ae911truth.org/news/275-news-media-events-canadian-civil-engineering-researchers-disprove-official-explanation-of-wtc-7-s-destruction.html