Chapter 5: Generation, Sampling and Quantification of Toxic Combustion Products

Despite a considerable body of published data on combustion chemistry and combustion product toxicity, the availability of an array of test methods and continued advances in analytical chemistry techniques, advances in understanding combustion toxicity and toxic fire hazards have been rather slow. This has occurred partly because of the huge range of components present in fire effluent and a lack of knowledge relating overall toxicity of the individual effects to interactions of all the individual components, and practical difficulties associated with sampling, detecting and quantifying each component from these complex mixtures of vapours and particulates. However, a major issue is the generally poor understanding of how much the range of different substances evolved and their yields depend on the combustion conditions. This has resulted in the development and use of combustion tests methods operating under poorly characterised combustion conditions often with little relevance to those occurring in actual fires. This chapter addresses aspects relating to the generation of fire effluents under well-characterised combustion conditions, the identification of methods performing inappropriately and the development of validated test methods. Consideration is then given to issues related to sampling and analysis of fire effluents.