North Tower Acceleration

[William Seger]

89. Yup, that's a clue. The section "Elastic Dynamic Analysis" is a little less obvious, but...

... that's an analysis of how much gravitational energy had been converted to strain energy (and thus removed from the falling mass) when the columns reached their maximum elastic deformation. It shows that there was about 31 times more energy available than was necessary to push the columns through elastic deformation and into inelastic deformation, a.k.a permanent damage. If the structure had been able to absorb that excess energy by inelastic deformation, however, then the collapse would have halted at that point, so Bazant calculates that energy in the section you referenced. That analysis shows the maximum energy that could have been absorbed, best case, was only about 1/8th of the energy of the falling mass.

Anyone who wants to challenge Bazant's conclusion must do exactly one thing: Show that the structure should have been able to absorb the gravitational energy of the falling mass. The only person I know of who actually attempted to do that was Gordon Ross, and he seems to have disappeared from the "truther" scene after his "momentum transfer" analysis was shown to be fatally flawed.