Ever wondered why smoke comes from fire? In this article we will describe a typical scenario of starting a fire and then explain how and why smoke comes from a fire.
Let’s say you have a nice fire going, and it has burned down to the point where what you see is a collection of hot “glowing embers.” The fire is still producing a lot of heat, but it is producing no smoke at all.
You might have gotten to this point either by starting the fire with logs in a fireplace or with charcoal.
If you now toss a piece of wood, or even a sheet of paper onto this fire, what you will notice is that the new fuel produces a lot of smoke as it heats up. Then, all of a sudden (often with a small pop), it bursts into flame and the smoke disappears.
If you have a fireplace or wood stove, or if you have been around a lot of campfires, this little scene is very familiar to you. It tells you a lot about smoke — let’s look at what is happening when smoke comes from a fire.
The Four Main Components of Wood
There are four things that you find in any piece of wood:
Water – Freshly cut wood contains a lot of water (sometimes more than half of its weight is water). Seasoned wood (wood that has been allowed to sit for a year or two) or kiln-dried wood contains a lot less water, but it still contains some.
Volatile Organic Compounds – When the tree was alive, it contained sap and a wide variety of volatile hydrocarbons in its cells.
Cellulose (a chief component of wood) is a carbohydrate, meaning it is made of glucose. A compound is “volatile” if it evaporates when heated. These compounds are all combustible (gasoline and alcohol are, after all, hydrocarbons — the volatile hydrocarbons in wood burn the same way).
Carbon Ash – Ash is the non-burnable minerals in the tree’s cells, like calcium, potassium and magnesium.
So now that we know all of the components we can understand what produces the smoke from a fire and why.
Some of the components act as fuel for the fire, and some do not. Some can be burned and some can not.
Smoke comes from a fire when there is not enough oxygen to burn the fuel completely. We call this incomplete combustion.
When everything in a fire is burned, producing just water and carbon dioxide, that’s called complete combustion. When incomplete combustion occurs Smoke is created.
So when smoke comes from a fire, what you’re seeing is an airborne collection of microscopic particles that cannot be burned.
Learn more about fire safety fundamentals
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