Dried cow dung is widely burned as solid fuel in developing part of the world. However, the chemicals arising from this type of fuel are extremely poorly understood. In our new contribution lead by Max, we surveyed across a number of key chemical properties of emissions from cow dung burning. These include the light absorption of particles, emission factor of levoglucosan (tracer for biomass burning), an other detailed chemical feature monitored by LC-MS. The major conclusion from our work is that the levoglucosan emission factor from cow dung is much less than that from wood burning. There was also a substantially larger organic nitrogen pool in the cow dung emission than wood burning emissions.

Link to the paper:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsearthspacechem.1c00268