Bored of the airplane question - safer towers

Here's another problem I have been wondering about for a while. How do you prevent a building collapse like the WTC? It could be due to an accidental plane strike due to a crashing plane, an earthquake, fire, ro due to terrorsm. You have to contain the damage and evacuate the people safely. How do you stop the floors from pancaking down with greater and greater force if a few of them give?

Ideas I like, from a fellow f-chatter.

1. Make the building lighter and narrower as you go up? The first 50 floors should be able to withstand the shock of the next 50 slamming down. Have slanted columns that shed the load outward. Is this even possible?

2. Have each floor's colums slant out a bit, then go straight up, so that if it buckles, the columns break and get flung out. Would this work, or would the floor sections that continue to fall down straight still create the pancaking disaster? Couldn't we create weak points along the floor so that they break predictably and also get flung out and fall just outside the building's footprint? Of course, the area around the building where the debris would have to be restricted access...perhaps a park or something.

3. Have helium tanks and quick-inflating balloons every 10 floors, on swing out derricks. How much would this cost? Is it worth it? Would it be effective, or would they float up into the flames? Perhaps a small motor and tracks so they can crawl along the derrick to a safe launching spot, and to power them away from the building once they are in flight?

4. The same swinging out platforms could also be used for helicopters to land and rescue people? Can they be light and strong enough? A helicopter's blades need 15 feet of clearance. If the platforms were 50 feet long, would it work? Can panicky people be trusted not to push the ones at the edge over?

4. Parachute pods with shock absorbers for up to 100 people? Is there enough distance for them to start breaking the fall? Perhaps they could be on some kind of rope or bungee system as well instead of parachutes only. I know they have chutes for small planes, so this seems like it would work? How much would 30 of these cost?

5. Stowed away extending ladders that can swing out and extend twenty floors down, to create new emergency exit routes that bypass the disaster area where the emergency exit routes could be blocked. How much weight would this need to support and how much would be its own weigh? These would have to allow access in from each floor as they extended.

Any other ideas? Any engineers/architects want to give us some insights? Is this too expensive? Would it not work?

 

Hair trigger security guy on every building roof with a rocket launcher? Seems cheaper than the alternatives...

 

How would he prevent an internal fire or earthquake?

What if he misses? What if he's asleep? What if he hits the wrong plane in crowded airspace?

 

I guess not man ypeople remember that a B-25 flew into the Empire State Building during WWII. The engines went straight through the building and fell onto the buildings below.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/misc/blempirecrash.htm

And why do they call them building when they're already done building them? Why don't they call them "builts?"

 

I think most of the major towers are capable of handling both...most of the large ones have pretty significant counterweight systems and fire suppression systems for things like fires and quakes. Maybe the discovery channel has mislead me, but I thought you meant for non-natural catastrophes. Of course, my response was still more than a little tongue in cheek, I can't think of anything I'd like less than knowing there was some $10/hour lunchpail guy with an rpg keeping an eye on my plane as I land

 

Good one! It's like asking why every "near-miss" is not called a "near-hit"!

--some comedian on TV

 

Hire an engineer.

 

It's already a violation to bring commercial or private aircraft into contact with a structure. Violators shall serve 5 years for doing so.

Make it Federal or State law that all corporations and business set up a "work at home" plan.

Institute a statute that it is a violation to make any building more than 20 stories high and or such-and-such feet.

Special permits are required for any building to exceed the above statute.
-Any building under this subpart will include the following mandaded by Federal law
* SeaWhizzer defense guns remote operated by NORAD

State and Federal buildings are exempt under this subpart.

 

Construct the building on top of a large conveyor. Have sensors to detect the approach of the plane. If the plane is going to hit the building, have Art turn on the conveyor and move the building out of the planes path.

Or better yet, have launchable flying conveyors. If the plane is going to hit the building, launch a conveyor that will fly up under the planes wheels and start rotating in the opposite direction. This will stop the plane.

 

You can't pass a law against accidents or terrorsm and expect it to not happen.

20 story buildings can also collapse.

Work at home might work, but people live in tall buildings as well. So then what?

Nice idea on the NORAD guns.

 

Hah! It won't stop the plane, unfortunately. You haven't been reading the other thread!

 

Build the skyscrapers underground..... you can still have a 100 story building but none of the risks. Install TV screens where all the windows would be to simulate a nice view.

Much safer
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HA! Nice one

 

Fantastic!

 

Glad you like it, that's why they pay me the big bucks.

 

Well Art,

definitely DO NOT build the building on a "giant conveyor belt"

 

My suggestion: cloak all buildings with "Star Trek" cloaking technology!

Bob

 

Why do they call them "droppings" even though they've already dropped (on your head or car etc).

 

IMO they need to develop lighter weight structures for super tall buildings, and work much harder on fire supression. The towers would still be standing if not for the insane heat.

Building the lower structure to support X amount of floors falling on it, are you flipping kidding me? Do you have any idea how much energy there is when you have a 20 floor office building FALLING. It's not impossible, but the whole lower structure would be so overbuilt it would be completely useless for it's intended design.

And as disturbing as it sounds, buildings are designed to fail in a specifc way. As was seen with both towers, they basically implode and fall into a big ass pile of debris. You absolutely do not want them leaning or falling onto one side, if that happened 5 blocks worth of buildings in any one direction would be completely destroyed.


For airplanes the solution is simple. Put a gps beacon on the top of each building over 40floors tall. Put a program into the planes that physically will not allow them to be flown with in 1000ft of these buildings. Would be like an invisible barrier, if your with in 1000ft of the top of the building in elevation you can't fly near it.

I like the gun idea too, put those .50cal autos like they have on the ends of aircraft carriers. Unloads something like 5k rounds/min Only downside is that you now have a big ass plane falling from the sky.

 

The WTC withstood the impact of the plane itself just fine.

The fires weakened the STEEL TRUSSES used to support the floors.

Steel trusses are notoriously quick to weaken in a fire, this is harldly unique to the WTC.

Solution:
Make the building out of ice. It'll melt a little and put out the fires.

A real solution:
Titanium trusses. Titanium holds it's stregenth under a much wider temperature range than steel.

Titanium is actually the 9th most abundent element in the earth's crust.
http://titanium-ore.helpdesk-station.com/titanium-ore.html

We just need a better way to REFINE it, and it will be CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!

 

I'm too lazy to dig it up right now but British Titanium developed a new way to refine it that could change the price drastically. Last I heard Timet had licensed the process and was working on scaling it up.

 

or.... NY could revise their building codes, (they likely have by now),
Ontario Building Code requires sprinklers in both sides of vertical I beams after any horizontal seperation, which would likely prevent a structural failure like that, also, at the WTC the columns met their neccessary fire-rating by being coated with spray on insulation, the problem was that upon impact all of the insulation was blown of by the inital explosion.

 

Hire Atlas and Hercules to work 12-hour shifts.

 

That would be quite a revelation in the building industry.

On the topic of neat new technology any of you guys hear about the plasma research MIT is doing? They have developed some massive electromagnet to suspend plasma inside a tube, effectively being able to contain it and reaching temperatures that would destroy everything if there was physical contact. They are shooting for temps of 50 MILLION degrees C. Their main objective is to use the extreme temperatures to split hydrogen/oxygen atoms, effectively turning water into a pollution free fuel.

Note: I haven't been able to find much info on it, but it seems pretty damn interesting. There are some smart mofo's at that school

 

Do you mean fusion? splitting (fission) hydrogen atoms is, for all intensive purposes, impossible. I guess theoretically we could break its proton down into its substituent quarks, but we barely know anything about them yet. So far, the fusion of two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom gives the most free energy that we know of...