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Show destruction. If some assumptions are made regarding their concentration, for example, their presence in equilibrium concentrations, then further estimates on incinerability can be made. With this formalism it is very straightforward to rank the waste in terms of incinerability if the rate constants for destruction of a compound are all larger than those for another. In general however, no claim of rigor can be made. The treatment does not deal with PIes. This is particularly serious in the cases where the PIes may also be the waste itself. In such cases, the treatment given here will be in error. One of the aims of this work is to explore the possibility of a more soundly based approach to the general treatment of the key issues. CHEMICAL KINETIC DATA BASE A quantitative data base of the chemistry in terms of all pertinent rate constants of single step thermal reactions can lead directly to a complete description, through simulation programs, of the overall chemical changes occurring during incineration. As systems become more complex (larger molecules) the completeness of the data base becomes the limiting factor. For the fluorinated compounds, the existing data base is sufficient to cover the destruction of one and perhaps two carbon atom systems. Since it does not contain fluorinated molecules larger than these, it clearly cannot make any predictions on their destruction and probably even more important, the formation of larger combustion byproducts (PIes). Hence for such situations, one must follow the more traditional approach of observing general trends and deriving results on the basis of various approximations. Actually, the art of carrying out simulations is sufficiently new so that it is probably always a good idea to see whether the results make good sense in the traditional manner. The following contains a description of the chemistry in the data base and the extensions which can be inferred. There has been much work in defining the chemistry of hydrocarbon and particularly methane combustion 10. Such data are transferable. The extension to cover the combustion of fluorinated compounds involves adding into the data base reactions of the fluorinated compounds and their decomposition products with each other, as well as reactions with the fuel. In this paper we make use of a data base that was recently assembled to describe the behavior of a number of the small fluorinated compounds as flame retardants. The 6 |