Smoke and Combustion Products

Seventy-six percent of the people that died in structural fires in 1990 died from the inhalation of toxic combustion products, not from burns (1). This percentage has been rising by about one percentage point per year since 1979. Although total deaths in fires are declining, the percentage attributed to smoke inhalation has increased. An area of research called combustion toxicity has evolved to study the adverse health effects caused by smoke or fire atmospheres. According to the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), smoke consists of “the airborne solid and liquid particulates and gases evolved when a material undergoes pyrolysis or combustion” (2) and therefore, includes combustion products. In this chapter, a fire atmosphere is defined as all the effluents generated by the thermal decomposition of materials or products regardless of whether that effluent is produced under smoldering, nonflaming, or flaming conditions. The objectives of combustion toxicity research are to identify potentially harmful products from the thermal degradation of materials, to determine the best measurement methods for the identification of the toxicants as well as the degree of toxicity, to determine the effect of different fire exposures on the composition of the toxic combustion products, to predict the toxicity of the combustion atmospheres based on the concentrations and the interaction of the toxic products, and to establish the physiological effects of such products on living organisms. The ultimate goals of this field of research are to reduce human fire fatalities due to smoke inhalation, to determine effective treatments for survivors, and to prevent unnecessary suffering of fire casualties caused by smoke inhalation. Other reviews of various aspects of this subject can be found in Refs 3–8. Keywords: Smoke; Combustion; Fire deaths; Toxic gases; Particulates; Toxic potency; Fire hazard; Fire risk; Toxicity assessment; Suppressants; Test methods; Predictive models