Our world is filled with soot from a myriad of sources for soot, char and ash.

These  include bonfires, incinerators, candles, vehicle tires, diesel engines, wildfires, fire places/stoves, leaf burning, trash burning, and many others.  How do you tell the difference between soot from background sources and soot from a fire event?  Fike Analytical uses a state-of-the-art Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) equipped with an Energy Dispersive X-Ray spectrometer (EDX) to use the chemistry of individual soot particles to determine their source.  It is not possible to use Light Microscopy to make this differentiation.