Thus fuel-oil heat exchangers which would probably heat vapor in addition to Jet-A.
Well, I didn't see the point in copying stuff verbatim from the Cal Tech report. Go there and all your questions from this post will be answered.
No center tank could be detonated under the same conditions that a 747 flying at 13,800 at 250+ knots would experience. It is damned cold at that altitude. Cold enough that the fuel even puts out a match.
That's what was thought, but test flights in an instrumented 74 showed that the temp was from 38 to 60 degrees C (that's up to 140F) inside the tank. This was news to just about everybody. More details in the Cal Tech report. They even have video of a 1/4 scale CWT blowing up in the lab -- under just those conditions. This is the test that Cashill says nobody did, which indicates how reckless his research is overall.
Also, flt 800 experienced the same flight conditions that thousands of other 747s have experienced. It even experienced the same flight conditions day after day. No explosions. None.
Right. But to make the tank go bang, you need two things: a flammable mixture, and a source of ignition. The flammable mixture with Jet A requires a nearly empty tank with not too much fuel in the ullage. Designers go to extremes to keep sources of ignition out of fuel tanks, but it's starting to look like the Boeing design of using the tank as a heat-sink for the air conditioners isn't as elegant as we thought it was for the last forty years. Spend some time on the Cal Tech explosives lab site, it's an eye-opener.
Another discovery that came from the research occasioned by TWA 800 is logical enough, but never really studied in depth -- at different temperatures, the hydrocarbons from the fuel will evaporate differently, and they don't evaporate uniformly. (Perhaps some of you know that common fuels, including auto gasoline and Jet A, are not uniform, but are a mixture of a variety of hydrocarbons. The lighter ones evaporate more quickly than the heavier ones, so the chemical & physical properties of the fuel can change as teh mixture changes. The potentially dangerous mixture is what's in the "ullage," or the part of the tank that doesn't have liquid fuel in it).
The FAA has taken action based on this research and other results of TWA 800 -- indeed, over 40 Airworthiness Directives resulted from this accident alone. An AD is kind of like a car recall, except the owner, not the manufacturer, has to pay for repairs. I guarantee you no aircraft manufacturer (nor fleet owner) sits still for an AD unless it's justified. (Sometimes manufacturers, including Raytheon (Beech) and Bell Helicopter, have used ADs to force old aircraft out of service and cut their liability trail, but that's another issue entirely. Airliners are normally retired long before they're as old as the planes Beech and Bell want to ground).
Keep digging. Read the stuff, though... Here's the Cal Tech link again. And here's a link to an article [PDF] that the Cal Tech guys published in a peer-reviewed journal in 1998. It answers some of the questions, even though Cal Tech still researched 800 for almost three more years after the cut-off of information for that article -- the website is more up-to-date.
The Engineering and Applied Science article also shows a graphic which answers Swordmaker's points in his "physics" post (sorry for not replying directly to your post, Sword! I have limited time). The nose section fell ballistically, the remainder continued for a bit, crippled and not as aerodynamic as it was, but still responding to the laws of aerodynamics. There were four forces working on it, lift, weight, thrust and drag. The break-up and shedding of the nose caused a huge increase in drag, but the wings were still providing lift even as airspeed tapered off. Your ballistic calculation assumes a non-aerodynamic object (like Galileo's cannonball). Bear in mind there were also winds aloft (without looking it up, the number 115kt at 30k sticks in my mind, so we're probably looking at 50-60 kt or so at 13.8) so heavier weight stuff will be closer to the pre-disaster flightpath and lighter stuff will be progressively further downwind. It's possible for stuff to be upwind if the machine changed course during the breakup sequence.
Take a look at what PA 103 did in its very different breakup sequence.
I have an in-depth study of inflight breakups half-written on my other laptop... the most unsurvivable type of accident there is (more people survive midairs). These guys at the air accident boards have plotting broken-up craft pretty much down to a science. When they get stuck, they go to colleagues in academia (as they did on the 800 fuel explosion).
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F