Thermal Decomposition Extent of Duff due to Surface Forest Fire

Abstract In ground fires, duff is thermally decomposed and smoldering combustion occurs. Duff is also partially decomposed by surface fire heating and the decomposition percentage is a clue to surface fire severity assessment. This article investigates thermal oxidative decomposition characteristics of Northeast Chinese forest duff samples, with and without surface fire heating effect, by thermogravimetry. The curves of all duff samples showed four stages, i.e. moisture evaporation, duff devolatilization, char oxidation and nearly-invisible inorganic minerals decomposition. The effect of surface fire heating was estimated by comparing the mass loss ratio of the devolatilization stage to the char oxidation stage and it was found that nearly 27.4% of original duff was decomposed by surface fire heating.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Procedia Engineering

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Chemistry, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/J.PROENG.2013.08.154
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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