Characterization of Soot

The characterization of physical and chemical properties of carbon particulate matter commonly named soot is relevant in the research on pollutants emitted in the atmosphere from combustion and industrial plants. The selection and the standardization of advanced analytical methods is necessary to provide reliable and reproducible results on the characteristics of carbon material. The present chapter reports an overview of the main off-line techniques available to characterize carbon materials as: elemental analysis, physical adsorption with the determination of the specific surface area, electronic microscopy techniques, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, infrared spec-troscopy, soot reactivity toward O2 and NO, UV-Visible spectroscopy, size exclu-sion chromatography and fluorescence spectroscopy. The results of the implementation of these techniques on a commercial standard carbon material (Printex-U carbon black), considered as an analogue of soot, are reported as a case study.