• Question: If the temperature in the glove box increases or decreases what will the consequences be?

    Asked by bumblebee33 to Ed on 13 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Edward Bovill

      Edward Bovill answered on 13 Mar 2013:


      The temperature in the glovebox can vary by up to 10 of 15 degrees without causing any problems. I quite often have pieces of equipment called ‘hot plates’ (imagine them like portable electric hobs) on at anywhere from 80C to 450C on in there for an hour or more at a time and it doesn’t affect things.

      If it got too hot then it would start to badly affect my experiments – things would start to dry too quickly and if it got too hot the rubber gloves would start to melt!

      The glovebox is a very complex piece of equipment and the environment inside is very carefully controlled by some clever machinery. The amount of water and oxygen is controlled so there are fewer than 1 atoms of oxygen/water in the atmosphere for every million atoms in there (on average)!

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