Safety
Hydrogen chloride forms corrosive hydrochloric acid on contact with water found in body tissue. Inhalation of the fumes can cause coughing, choking, inflammation of the nose, throat, and upper respiratory tract, and in severe cases, pulmonary edema, circulatory system failure, and death. Skin contact can cause redness, pain, and severe skin burns. Hydrogen chloride may cause severe burns to the eye and permanent eye damage.
The gas, being strongly hydrophilic, can be easily scrubbed from the exhaust gases of a reaction by bubbling it through water, producing useful hydrochloric acid as a byproduct.
Any equipment handling hydrogen chloride gas must be checked on a routine basis; particularly valve stems and regulators. The gas requires the use of specialized materials on all wetted parts of the flow path, as it will interact with or corrode numerous materials hydrochloric acid alone will not; such as stainless and regular polymers.
Read more about this topic: Hydrogen Chloride
Famous quotes containing the word safety:
“Can we not teach children, even as we protect them from victimization, that for them to become victimizers constitutes the greatest peril of all, specifically the sacrifice—physical or psychological—of the well-being of other people? And that destroying the life or safety of other people, through teasing, bullying, hitting or otherwise, “putting them down,” is as destructive to themselves as to their victims.”
—Lewis P. Lipsitt (20th century)
“Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.”
—Stephen Vizinczey (b. 1933)
“For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman;... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)