Eli5 why is there no liquid wood

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Assuming no oxygen is around could we melt wood?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Wood is not a single substance. wood is made up of thousands of different compounds, each with different melting points (in fact, some organic compounds don’t have melting points at all; they decompose into different molecules if you try to heat/pressurize them too much), so wood doesn’t have a melting point in the same way that water, iron, and salt do, since wood isn’t a single compound like those other things.

If you heat up a piece of wood in the presence of oxygen, the wood will just burn (i.e., undergo combustion, a permanent chemical reaction) and you’ll be left with carbon and a whole bunch of other gasses like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides, and nitrogen oxides.

If you heat up wood in a vacuum or otherwise not in the presence of oxygen, the individual chemicals that make up wood will either melt individually, react, or decompose. Mostly, you’ll end up with carbon dioxide, water vapor, and and carbon.

Also, [this was just asked a few weeks ago,](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14qbjz9/comment/jqm9czv/?context=3) so please search first next time.

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