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Asked by lisaloo to Rob on 17 Jun 2013.
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Robert Woolfson answered on 17 Jun 2013:
So, that whole thing that looks a bit like a box is called a fume hood. We do all our reactions in there so any chemical which escape into the air are sucked into a ventilation system and we don’t breath them in.
The metallic looking plates at the bottom are the scientific equivalent of the hob on a stove. I use them to heat my chemistry up. All the hoses and the fancy looking glassware at the back is called a Schlenk line. Some of the chemicals I work with are really sensitive to air, so I need to work with them under nitrogen instead.
The schlenk line lets me use both a vacuum pump and nitrogen gas to control my reaction and try and get it to work properly.
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Comments
lisaloo commented on :
That is really cool. Do you think we would ever do anything like that at school or is it to sciency?
Rob commented on :
It’s not too sciencey, but it is too expensive for schools to get all the equipment in. Those hot plates cost £400 each and the Schlenk line costs about £1000. Then there’s the vacuum pump and the nitrogen. That’s before buying a single chemical. It’s hard enough for some labs to afford this stuff with dedicated money.
The other thing is safety. If you need to use the Schlenk line, the chemicals are usually dangerous. It took me three years of lab experience at university before I was really doing anything with them. Even now, I’m still nervous using it in case I mess it up and break all the expensive equipment or start a fire.
Having said all that, if you can get onto a university outreach thing like the Salters camps that are run every summer in some universities including Manchester, you get to go into the labs and start using some equipment that schools would never have access to.
lisaloo commented on :
We can’t all be rich! 😉