The United States Environmental Protection Agency has some useful information on the health effects of wood smoke, stating: "Wood smoke contains harmful chemical substances such as carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), dioxin, and inhalable particulate matter (PM). Some of the VOCs are irritating, toxic, and/or cancer causing. One of the biggest human health threats from smoke, indoors or outdoors, comes from PM. Wood smoke PM is composed of wood tars, gases, soot, and ashes. Toxic air pollutants are a potentially important component of wood smoke. A group of air toxics known as polycyclic organic matter includes potential carcinogens such as benzo(a)pyrene."
Table 2, from a study done by the American Chemical Institute, which can be found here:
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/article.cgi/esthag/2000/34/i11/html/es9909632.html
outlines in detail some of the gasses and particulates released by burning wood. Because there are hundreds of particulates, gases and compounds released in burning wood, I was unable to find a complete list in laymans terms. The three most common that are measured in studies I examined were Carbon Monoxide, Carbon Dioxide & Methyl chloride. Other common gases that were detailed from the hundreds found, many of which are known as ozone depleting “greenhouse gases”, are CHCl3 (chloroform or trichloromethane), CH3CCl3 (trichloroethane or methyl chloroform), CCl4 (Carbon Tetrachloride), TCE (trichloroethylene), PCE (tetrachloroethylene or perchloroethylene), CH3Cl (Methyl Chloride),F-113 ( trichlorotrifluoroethane), N2O (Nitrogen Oxide).
If you are looking for an exhaustive list of gases released when a particular type of wood is burned, I would encourage you to feel free to get back to us here at Radical Reference, or to contact your local public or university library.
Sources:
http://www.epa.gov/woodstoves/healthier.html
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/pubs/92046.pdf
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/1982/16/i10/f-pdf
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts18.html
www.dhs.ca.gov/ohb/HESIS/tce.htm
www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts30.html
Atmospheric Environment Volume 37, Issues 9-10 , March 2003, Pages 1211-1222
James P. Lodge, Jr. Memorial Issue. Measurement Issues in Atmospheric Chemistry (http://tinyurl.com/37rlvr)
Looks like a good answer to
Looks like a good answer to me. There is always more to be found, especially on anything related to pollutants. For example, even a fairly crude search of images.google.com for: "burning wood" "combustion products" gets 127 hits, including sites such as http://virtual.vtt.fi/virtual/innofirewood/stateoftheart/database/burning/burning.html and mha-net.org/msb/html/papers-n/awma03/p-awma3.htm
The "images" search: "forest fires" "combustion products" site:gov gets 131 hits, including "BIOMASS BURNING AND THE PRODUCTION OF GREENHOUSE GASES" by Joel S. Levine, Atmospheric Sciences Competency NASA Langley Research Center
Hampton, Virginia, at http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/biomass_burn/biomass.html This appears to be chapter 9 of: Climate Biosphere Interaction: Biogenic Emissions and Environmental Effects of Climate ChangeEdited by Righard G.Zepp ISBN 0-471-58943-3 Copyright 1994 John Wiley and Sons, Inc. It has 8 tables giving figures for production of gases by various types of forests and types of wood; and tables 9 and 10 compare Kuwaiti oilfield fires after Gulf War I.
If you are interested in house or building fires, the burning of wood (or more likely panels and beams made of composites that contain many things besides wood) is an entirely different story. Compare the web search (not just images): "particle board" "combustion products" site:gov (122 hits).
There are many databases to search in libraries, or remotely if you have a library card. In academic libraries, you can go from highly technical ones such as Compendex, NTIS, Web of Science and Science Direct, to more general ones such as Academic Search. Science Direct gets 48 hits for the search "wood combustion" and gases (in title or abstract). Academic Search gets 10 hits for: "wood combustion" and gases (titles, subjects, abstracts).
In public libraries, newspaper databases might help get some useful short articles. Most public libraries give access to Masterfile (Ebsco), which gets 13 hits for: wood and burning and gases.
If you are not near a big library, but want to try for highly technical information in addition to those google.com searches using site:gov (or by searching usa.gov directly), you can also try searching patents. I get 75 hits for: "wood combustion" and gases in the full text of US patents at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm Compare Google.com/patents, which has OCR of US patents back to 1836. That gets 42 hits for: "wood combustion" gases. The European Patent Office's enormous (30+ million patents) database Espacenet ( http://ep.espacenet.com ) gets only 3 hits for "wood combustion" gases in title or abstract, but 524 for: wood combustion gases. There is far less searchable text in Espacenet, so you have to leave out the quotes. Like Google, the space means "AND" - all the words must be in the short record somewhere. But they only are searching English title and English abstract. A real patent search (to find every possible related patent) would require looking for subject classification numbers, but just a word search might get you lots of useful information on this question. It might require plowing through a lot of text to find tables and charts, however.
Thanks,
Jim Miller
jmiller2@umd.edu