fire in the lab!

Ah! Giant fire in the lab across from us!



Okay, that photo isn't actually our fire. But our fire was pretty big, in my unbiased opinion. A benzene still caught fire (still unsure over the exact cause, but an old still plus maybe some water is a likely culprit). Our lab came in to the sights of flames licking at the ceiling.

We grabbed the fire extinguisher and put it out (apparently this isn't the greatest idea, as you can blow the fire onto other flammable sources such as other stills) and pulled the alarm.

Everything is okay now, other than a huge pile of extinguisher poop. Whew!

mission accomplished

I successfully did not blow up the chemistry lab today. Which is no small feat, let me tell you.

We use, on an everyday basis, two quartz tube furnaces that go up to 1100°C. We normally use them with Ar or dilute H2/Ar mixtures. I've used them so much that I kind of forget that 1100°C is nice and toasty warm. I've never tried to roast a marshmellow, but I bet you I could.

Anyway, I set up a run today with 20% H2/Ar as the carrier gas. High concentrations of H2 + 1100 degrees of scorching heat + large cylinders of compressed gas is *probably* completely safe and sound, if properly set up. The biggest risk is static electricity, which can accumulate on the surfaces of insulators like quartz or tygon tubing. We got around that by using Cu tubing for the most part, grounded to metal monkey bars, and cooling our outlet vent.

It did have the potential to go completely and horribly wrong if it did in fact malfunction. Which, I guess, describes about 85% of all the experimenting I do around here. But, it's an interesting thought- if you were the student responsible for causing the serious injury or death of someone through your research, would you want to stay in Chemistry? If not, what would you do?

sympathy

The poor schmucks at SFU got their labs flooded last week. I can only shudder at how much that would suck for my degree. We've had a few floods in our lab, leading me to be ultraparanoid when clamping cooling tubes for refluxes, but nothing that would shut the whole building down. Yikes.

(link via C&EN)