Recognition of emission from the wood based products waste combustion using differential ion mobility spectrometry

This work was focussed on the recognition of the emission of volatile compounds resulting from the combustion of engineered wood products waste. This kind of waste is broadly used for heating purposes in an unauthorised way, giving rise to unorganised emissions. The recognition of such events is very difficult due to the complexity of the produced gas mixture. We proposed to apply differential ion mobility spectrometry (DMS). This is a promising technique in terms of complex gas mixtures measurements. The recognition was based on the measurements of ambient air in the vicinity of the emission source and classification. The ensemble of classification trees was chosen as the classier. The obtained results showed that volatile compounds resulting from the combustion of wood based boards waste produced the distinctive DMS spectra, which could be used as the basis for the effective recognition. We achieved almost 100 % successful recognition of: 1) ambient air which contained volatile compounds resulting from OSB board waste combustion, 2) ambient air which contained volatile compounds resulting from MDF board waste combustion, and 3) ambient air, which was did not contain volatile compounds of this kind. The presented results have a considerable practical value. The DMS spectrometer was successfully applied to recognize wood-based boards waste combustion in field conditions.