Interesting Swiss analysis mentioning your work and addressing many open questions: https://swprs.org/the-nord-stream-mystery-new-insights/ I find it strange there is hardly any discussion about the peculiar geographic and temporal pattern of the explosions or the mysterious tanker ship.
I wonder weather the pushing of the out flowing gas would be enough to simply tear off the pipe. This seems possible because the force of the out flowing gas has to be balanced by the strain in the pipeline parts. Assuming a displacement of 10 cm in the mid between two pipe segments (12 m) would yield a pulling force 60 times as strong as the force from the gas (parallelogram of forces). If there were a weaker part in the pipe, i.e. in a weldseam, it might break.
Your imagery from the site of the first explosion seems to be supportive for this idea. In contrast to the NS1 sites, all pipe segments seem to be present and pretty much on the original line. On a length of five pipe segments there are large damages. There are two sharp bends where the pipe segments remained connected and one clear disruption of about 7 m length. At the first bend from North the pipe is still close to the original sea bed, there is apparently a narrow pit. The second bend two pipe segments ahead is down a deep hole, should be about 7 m from your sounding data. Here the greatest part of the gas from the northern part of the pipeline was blown out, probably sideways through the hole caused by the explosion. Three pipe segments further, the northern remains of the pipe end.
I believe the bomb was placed at location 7 in the figure on page 7 in his doc. The forces of the gas are definitely the main cause of the destruction, but the exact sequence of breakup is still unclear to me.
Location 7 is the very place I tried to describe as suspicious.
Meanwhile I made some calculations of the acting forces with the result, that the pipes might hold, but only just so. There might be another way for breaking the pipe, but first a sketch of my computations.
Assuming that three pipe segments are available for stretching on each side of the hole in the pipe line. That gives a right angle triangle of 36 m length and as height whatever displacement of the pipe line is chosen. The length of the extended pipe segments can be computed with Pythagoras' theorem. With Young's modulus for steel (210GPa) the force per area can then be computed, reaching about 500 N/mm² when displaced for 2.5 m ! The numbers of maximal tension for different sorts of steel are between 370 and 550 N/mm². Remains to compute the cross section, with inner diameter 1.153 m and wall thickness 35 mm, we have 0.13 m², and the decomposition of the force, from the direction of the hypotenuse to that of the cathetusses. This gives 4.44e6 N for 2.5 m displacement. Doubled because of the contribution of the other side, this covers your computed maximum power of 7.8e6 N.
The resulting somewhat boring scenario would be: the thrust from the hole in the side of the pipe line moves it in the opposite direction and builds up a strong tension in the line. This tension moves the pipeline back towards its former position when the thrust gets reduced with time.
From my very limited experiences with metal pipes or water hoses my impression is that by bending such a thing strong enough, the result is a fold in which the shape of cross section becomes nearly flat, i.e. extreme curvature at the sides and reduced curvature elsewhere. Applied to our pipe line bent side ways, the extreme curvature should appear on top and on the bottom. This would pretty surely cause an initial crack. This crack will propagate orthogonally to the tension in the pipe, i.e. around the circumference of the pipe, the area holding the tension will become accordingly smaller and eventually break.
I'm not a scientist but your independent survey seems very interesting. I would like you to comment the recent news from german inquiry together with an abstract of your previous notes. Thanks, Laura
In his December 2023 Substack post on the amount of explosives used, Ola Tunander thinks the "spike" you mention at the end could have resulted from enough explosives being used to actually compress the gas. Presumably that would be a lot of explosives, giving the pipeline more of a "broadside" rather than just cutting it open. But you think of it as mere sound from the explosion?
Even a small amount of explosives would compress the gas in a few milliseconds and send off a pressure wave, traveling as sound along the pipe. You can't make any conclusions about the relative "energy" of the bombs and the expanding gas based on this. The pressure of the explosion is always higher initially. I still haven't seen the curves, but I hope they will support the theory that the 3 bombs which exproded on pressurize pipes were identical, and also reveal the relative timing of these explosions. That could make it possible to identify the explosions in the seismic record, and separate them form the effects breakup of the pipeline from gas thrust. The main evidence for small bombs is the impact analysis on NS2AS. I'm also hoping that the relative timing of the explosions will reveal something about the trigger mechanism that was used.
Interesting Swiss analysis mentioning your work and addressing many open questions: https://swprs.org/the-nord-stream-mystery-new-insights/ I find it strange there is hardly any discussion about the peculiar geographic and temporal pattern of the explosions or the mysterious tanker ship.
I wonder weather the pushing of the out flowing gas would be enough to simply tear off the pipe. This seems possible because the force of the out flowing gas has to be balanced by the strain in the pipeline parts. Assuming a displacement of 10 cm in the mid between two pipe segments (12 m) would yield a pulling force 60 times as strong as the force from the gas (parallelogram of forces). If there were a weaker part in the pipe, i.e. in a weldseam, it might break.
Your imagery from the site of the first explosion seems to be supportive for this idea. In contrast to the NS1 sites, all pipe segments seem to be present and pretty much on the original line. On a length of five pipe segments there are large damages. There are two sharp bends where the pipe segments remained connected and one clear disruption of about 7 m length. At the first bend from North the pipe is still close to the original sea bed, there is apparently a narrow pit. The second bend two pipe segments ahead is down a deep hole, should be about 7 m from your sounding data. Here the greatest part of the gas from the northern part of the pipeline was blown out, probably sideways through the hole caused by the explosion. Three pipe segments further, the northern remains of the pipe end.
My fellow analyst Michael Kobs wrote about this site https://www.docdroid.net/bkPb6lz/nordstream2ad-draft-pdf
I believe the bomb was placed at location 7 in the figure on page 7 in his doc. The forces of the gas are definitely the main cause of the destruction, but the exact sequence of breakup is still unclear to me.
Location 7 is the very place I tried to describe as suspicious.
Meanwhile I made some calculations of the acting forces with the result, that the pipes might hold, but only just so. There might be another way for breaking the pipe, but first a sketch of my computations.
Assuming that three pipe segments are available for stretching on each side of the hole in the pipe line. That gives a right angle triangle of 36 m length and as height whatever displacement of the pipe line is chosen. The length of the extended pipe segments can be computed with Pythagoras' theorem. With Young's modulus for steel (210GPa) the force per area can then be computed, reaching about 500 N/mm² when displaced for 2.5 m ! The numbers of maximal tension for different sorts of steel are between 370 and 550 N/mm². Remains to compute the cross section, with inner diameter 1.153 m and wall thickness 35 mm, we have 0.13 m², and the decomposition of the force, from the direction of the hypotenuse to that of the cathetusses. This gives 4.44e6 N for 2.5 m displacement. Doubled because of the contribution of the other side, this covers your computed maximum power of 7.8e6 N.
The resulting somewhat boring scenario would be: the thrust from the hole in the side of the pipe line moves it in the opposite direction and builds up a strong tension in the line. This tension moves the pipeline back towards its former position when the thrust gets reduced with time.
From my very limited experiences with metal pipes or water hoses my impression is that by bending such a thing strong enough, the result is a fold in which the shape of cross section becomes nearly flat, i.e. extreme curvature at the sides and reduced curvature elsewhere. Applied to our pipe line bent side ways, the extreme curvature should appear on top and on the bottom. This would pretty surely cause an initial crack. This crack will propagate orthogonally to the tension in the pipe, i.e. around the circumference of the pipe, the area holding the tension will become accordingly smaller and eventually break.
So that‘s it for today.
I'm not a scientist but your independent survey seems very interesting. I would like you to comment the recent news from german inquiry together with an abstract of your previous notes. Thanks, Laura
I'm commenting on Twitter
https://x.com/Erkperk/status/1824032803295461391
In his December 2023 Substack post on the amount of explosives used, Ola Tunander thinks the "spike" you mention at the end could have resulted from enough explosives being used to actually compress the gas. Presumably that would be a lot of explosives, giving the pipeline more of a "broadside" rather than just cutting it open. But you think of it as mere sound from the explosion?
Even a small amount of explosives would compress the gas in a few milliseconds and send off a pressure wave, traveling as sound along the pipe. You can't make any conclusions about the relative "energy" of the bombs and the expanding gas based on this. The pressure of the explosion is always higher initially. I still haven't seen the curves, but I hope they will support the theory that the 3 bombs which exproded on pressurize pipes were identical, and also reveal the relative timing of these explosions. That could make it possible to identify the explosions in the seismic record, and separate them form the effects breakup of the pipeline from gas thrust. The main evidence for small bombs is the impact analysis on NS2AS. I'm also hoping that the relative timing of the explosions will reveal something about the trigger mechanism that was used.