Biomass burning combustion products

Thomas, W., E. Hegels, S. Slijkhuis, R. Spurr, and K. Chance, Detection of Biomass Burning Combustion Products in Southeast Asia from Backscatter Data Taken by the GOME Spectrometer, Geophys. Res. Lett., 25, 1317-1329 (1998). 

Thomas W. Hegels E. Slijkhuis S. Spurr R. and Chance K. (1998a). Detection of biomass burning combustion products in South East Asia from backscatter data taken by the GOME spectrometer. Geophysical Research Letters, 25, 1317-1320... 

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, sometimes also called polynuclear aromatics, PNA) are a hazardous class of widespread pollutants. The parent structures of the common PAHs are shown in Fig. 4 and the alkylated homologs are generally minor in combustion emissions. PAHs are produced by all natural combustion processes (e.g., wild fires) and from anthropogenic activity such as fossil fuels combustion, biomass burning, chemical manufacturing, petroleum refining, metallurgical processes, coal utilization, tar production, etc. [6,9,15,18, 20,24,131-139]. 

In an international effort, the Reactive Chlorine Emissions Inventory (Keene et al., 1999, and references therein) was compiled which includes chlorine emissions from the following four source-type classes (i) oceanic and terrestrial biogenic emissions (ii) sea salt aerosol production and dechlorination (iii) biomass burning and (iv) exclusively anthropogenic sources like industry, fossil fuel combustion, and incineration. They provide numbers from atmospheric burdens and fluxes for the individual species and sources. 

Figure 11, Biomass burning experiments using PTR-MS to monitor emissions of VOCs. The data illustrate a typical biomass burning experiment where VOCs and some known combustion products (HCN, CO and CO2) were analyzed during the burning of tropical plant matter. Data replotted from Ref. [77].

The second limitation of Py-GC-MS is that the complex pyrolysate was not just pyrolysis products it consisted of evaporation and combustion products of HS. ° It was reported that free compounds, e.g., alkanes, and fatty acids in HS macromolecules evaporated quickly under pyrolysis, and stmctural units split off through burning in the presence of oxygen and can be further incorporated into HS. For example, lipids, e.g., alkanes, fatty acids, dicarboxylic acids, and ketones were often found as free or solvent-extractable compounds in soils and soil HS. These compounds can be synthesized by microorganisms and plants, and can occur upon combustion of fossil fuels and biomasses. Alkylfurans and methoxylated phenols were considered pyrolysis products of... 

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