This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: What happens during a wildfire? The short answer is: much more than we know.
As wildfires burn through trees, grasses and other vegetation, heat from the flames sets off thousands of chemical reactions at once. Molecules break apart, recombine and transform into new compounds, releasing gases, soot and other carbon-rich particles into the air. While scientists can see the products of these reactions, what happens in between is much harder to understand.
Many of the chemical reactions that drive combustion take place so quickly that they are nearly impossible to observe. That's where Jas Shahanand comes in. A sixth-year Ph.D. student in the Paul M.
Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder, Shahanand is finding ways to capture and identify some of these fleeting molecules, giving researchers a closer look at the hidden chemistry of combustion. He believes the work, published in PRX Energy, could be the foundation for more accurate wildfire emissions models, improved climate predictions and even cleaner fuel sources in the future. "These chemical reactions are often very generalized because they occur in a black box.
But there's actually a lot of good information hidden in those intermediate processes," said Shahanand. "My goal is to analyze those processes from a gas-based perspective to help provide a deeper understanding of how combustion chemistry really works." The key to Shahanand's research lies in a type of tiny molecule called radicals. Radicals, created by heat and other high-energy environments, act as the driving force behind combustion.
They come with an unpaired electron, making them extremely unstable and reactive. When they react with other stable molecules, they steal an electron to create a pair. This sets off a chain reaction of molecular-level theft—new radicals crashing into molecules and robbing electrons over and over again.
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