How does wood turn into charcoal and why is charcoal more effective fuel?

Question

How does wood turn into charcoal and why is charcoal more effective fuel?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

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