Safety
There are hazards associated even with simple operations such as evaporation. These include implosions resulting from use of glassware that contains flaws, such as star-cracks. Explosions may occur from concentrating unstable impurities during evaporation, for example when rotavapping an ethereal solution containing peroxides. This can also occur when taking certain unstable compounds, such as organic azides and acetylides, nitro-containing compounds, molecules with strain energy, etc. to dryness.
Users of rotary evaporation equipment must take precautions to avoid contact with rotating parts, particularly entanglement of loose clothing, hair, or necklaces. Under these circumstances, the winding action of the rotating parts can draw the users into the apparatus resulting in breakage of glassware, burns, and chemical exposure. Extra caution must also be applied to operations with air reactive materials, especially when under vacuum. A leak can draw air into the apparatus and a violent reaction can occur.
Read more about this topic: Rotary Evaporator
Famous quotes containing the word safety:
“[As teenager], the trauma of near-misses and almost- consequences usually brings us to our senses. We finally come down someplace between our parents’ safety advice, which underestimates our ability, and our own unreasonable disregard for safety, which is our childlike wish for invulnerability. Our definition of acceptable risk becomes a product of our own experience.”
—Roger Gould (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)
“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)