- Author
-
Voorhees, K. J.
|
Tsao, R.
- Title
- Smoke Aerosol Analysis by Pyrolysis-Mass Spectrometry/Pattern Recognition for Assessment of Fuels Involved in Flaming Combustion.
- Coporate
- Colorado School of Mines, Golden
- Journal
-
Analytical Chemistry,
Vol. 57,
No. 8,
1630-1636,
July 1985
- Sponsor
- National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD
- Keywords
-
smoke
|
aerosols
|
pattern recognition
- Abstract
- Pyrolysis-mass spectrometry with pattern recognition has been used to analyze smoke aerososls to determine contributing fuels involved in fires. Aerosols generated in a flaming mode in a laboratory calorimeter from mixtures formulated from 10 polymeric substances were collected on glass filters. The nonvolatile materials associated with the aerosols were pyrolyzed to provide mass spectral fingerprints of the mixtures. Factor analysis with graphical rotation genereated factor spectra which were compared to reference pyrolysis spectra of aerosols from the pure polymers. An overall identification rate of 78% was achieved.