How does wood turn into charcoal and why is charcoal more effective fuel?
In: Chemistry
wood is made of carbon and hydrogen, when heated enough, the hydrogen combines with the oxygen in the air to form water vapor and leave behind pure carbon. Pure carbon is called coal.
Water is H2O, so you need twice as many H “wood” atoms than O atoms from the air.
This is called incomplete combustion.
Now when you burn the pure carbon, the C reacts with the oxygen in the air to CO2. now you only need one fuel atom to burn 2 oxygen, so you need 4 times less fuel to burn the same amount of oxygen.
This is complete combustion
If you burn wood under normal conditions, it burns up, you’re left with ash. But if you control the conditions carefully, keeping the heat high but the oxygen level low, you can burn off the non-carbon bits of the wood, and what you’re left with is the carbon, the part that’s actually useful as fuel.
To get charcoal, you use a controlled process to remove all the stuff that doesn’t burn well, and you are left with a concentrated, pure, hot burning fuel.
Others covered a lot, no one covered that Charcoal doesn’t smoke like wood does. If you have a forge in your castle, do you want it filled with smoke from wood sap, blinding eyes and choking lungs? Nope, enter charcoal.
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