A BYU chemical engineering professor and his Ph.D. student have developed an advanced model that can help predict pollution caused by wildfire smoke. The research, sponsored by the USDA Forest Service and the Department of Energy, provides a physical model that can more reliably predict soot and smoke emissions from wildfires over a range of conditions.
“The smoke that you see from wildfires is a combination of evolved gases and soot,” said Alex Josephson, a Ph.D. student in BYU’s chemical engineering program who also works on the project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “When we look at smoke as far as health effects, typically we care about those soot particles; and that’s what we’re modeling.”
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