Okay you’re right about that, Terminal velocity is the speed, I definitely can say you taught me something, I was aware of the air resistance difference but I was thinking about Freefall in the wrong way
If a story is approximately 10 feet in height and, say, 2 stories were involved in the initial collapse, that would be a free fall of 20 feet. You can have fun solving for the speed and time at which this occurs.
Hint: Find the time from the acceleration distance equation. Then find the speed by the acceleration speed equation. And then multiply the mass and speed of the upper stories to get the momentum. And multiply the weight of the upper stories by the fall distance to get the energy. If the energy is greater than the failure energy of the next lower floor, there is no stopping the collapse.
So I started to have fun and then really over though the mass part of the equation, I must admit I broke down and found a calculation website, after playing with it for a few minutes using your example the speed is 36ft/s and the time is 1.115s, I extrapolated the height and was honestly surprised
Okay you’re right about that, Terminal velocity is the speed, I definitely can say you taught me something, I was aware of the air resistance difference but I was thinking about Freefall in the wrong way
If a story is approximately 10 feet in height and, say, 2 stories were involved in the initial collapse, that would be a free fall of 20 feet. You can have fun solving for the speed and time at which this occurs.
Hint: Find the time from the acceleration distance equation. Then find the speed by the acceleration speed equation. And then multiply the mass and speed of the upper stories to get the momentum. And multiply the weight of the upper stories by the fall distance to get the energy. If the energy is greater than the failure energy of the next lower floor, there is no stopping the collapse.
So I started to have fun and then really over though the mass part of the equation, I must admit I broke down and found a calculation website, after playing with it for a few minutes using your example the speed is 36ft/s and the time is 1.115s, I extrapolated the height and was honestly surprised