What’s the difference between flammability and combustibility?

Question

What’s the difference between flammability and combustibility?

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Answer 1

Flammability is how easily a material will catch fire. It has to do with how reactive (chemically) the material would be to react with the oxygen in air, and thus burn.

Combustibility is how well a material will continue to burn (once it is on fire). This has partly to do with whether the fire that’s produced by the material has high enough temperature to inflame adjacent material. Fire is hot, but there are variations in how hot a fire will burn (600 C for wood, 3000 C for acetylene (welding torch) for example).