ABSTRACT
The interpretation of data generated from fire debris examination usually focuses on recognizing the patterns of ignitable liquids in the chromatograms of the fire debris samples. If fire debris samples contained only ignitable liquids the task of interpretation would be made much simpler and probably could be performed by software alone. However, inherent to fire debris are pyrolysis products that can obscure the ignitable liquid patterns. In Chapter 1 I will attempt to provide an approach to pattern recognition of ignitable liquids and highlight some common features of each class of ignitable liquid (as defined by ATSM), as well as point out some telltale signs of pyrolysis. While pattern recognition software is available and may aide in screening data, ultimately all data must be visually interpreted by an analyst. Once an interpretation has been made, it is important to compare the sample to a known ignitable liquid with a similar pattern.
