Modelling the NO emissions from wildfires at the source level

Abstract

There is a growing interest to characterize fire plumes in order to control air quality during wildfire episodes and to estimate the carbon and ozone balance of fire emissions. A numerical approach has been used to study the mechanisms of NO formation at the source level in wildfires given that NO plays an important role in the formation of ground-level ozone. The major reaction mechanisms involved in NO chemistry have been identified using reaction path analysis. Accordingly, a two-step global kinetic scheme in the gas phase has been proposed herein to account for the volatile fuel-bound nitrogen (fuel-N) conversion to NO, considering that the volatile fraction of fuel-N is released as NH3. Data from simulations using the perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) code from CHEMKIN-II package with a detailed kinetic mechanism (GDF-Kin® 3.0) have been used to calibrate and evaluate the global model under typical wildfire conditions in terms of the composition of the degradation gases of vegetation, the equivalence ratio, the range of temperatures and the residence time.