New source of fire records gives a bigger picture of the risks

Sand dunes are not an obvious place to find high-quality fire records. For a start, anyone who walks on the forested sand dunes of South-East Queensland will be impressed by the intensity of ant activity at their feet. The ...

Policy changes could make charcoal more sustainable

Eclipsed by energy sources such as gas and electricity, charcoal is often left out of contemporary discussions about the global energy transition. It's a resource that some manufacturing processes, such as steel and silicon ...

Crime-scene technique identifies asteroid sites

Tens of tons of extraterrestrial solid material collide with Earth daily. Most of this material is small enough that it burns up in the atmosphere, but some fragments are large enough to cause quite a predicament. In 2013, ...

page 1 from 7

Charcoal

Charcoal is the dark grey residue consisting of carbon, and any remaining ash, obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents from animal and vegetation substances. Charcoal is usually produced by slow pyrolysis, the heating of wood or other substances in the absence of oxygen (see pyrolysis, char and biochar). It is usually an impure form of carbon as it contains ash; however, sugar charcoal is among the purest forms of carbon readily available, particularly if it is not made by heating but by dehydrating with sulphuric acid to minimise introducing new impurities, as impurities can be removed from the sugar in advance. The resulting soft, brittle, lightweight, black, porous material resembles coal.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA