Smoke Emission from Wood and Wood Based Products

This paper deals with the smoke emission from wood and wood-based products. The amount of smoke released from organic polymers (e.g. wood and wood-based materials) is commonly quantified by smoke extinction area per mass loss of sample. The impact of sample density, external heat flux exposing sample surface, trees kind (coniferous and deciduous) and extractives content in samples for oak wood, spruce wood, and pinewood on the smoke extinction area per sample mass loss was investigated in this study. The cone calorimeter test (at three different external heat fluxes: 25, 35, and 50 kW/m2) measures the extinction area of smoke released from the investigated wood. The obtained results proved the significant impact of wood species (extractives content) on the smoke extinction area. The average smoke extinction area per sample mass loss for all investigated wood species lay in the interval from 4.6 to 81.5 m2/kg (standard deviation was up to 20.5 m2/kg). However, the pinewood (the sample with the highest content of extractives) shows a significantly higher smoke extinction area per sample mass loss (61.8 to 81.5 m2/kg) than oak wood (4.6 to 18.2 m2/kg) and spruce wood (10.7 to 29.5 m2/kg). Besides that, both the external heat flux (exposing sample surface) and sample density have no negligible impact on the smoke extinction area per sample mass loss.