Since I'm working with anaerobic solutions i had the opportunity to meet this elegant lady that occupes a big part of my small lab.
Let me introduce you the Glove Box! :)
According to me the glove box, it's really a great invention, and as it often happens behind a big invention there is a simple idea.
The mechanism in fact is quite easy to understand.
As I've already explained, I'm preparing solutions without oxygen.
Of course it's not easy forbidding that oxygen spreads into our fluids, considering also that air contains 21% of this gas.
For this reason once we obtain an anaerobic solution it's always better closing the bottle with a rubber stop that has a best adhesion and does not permit to any gasses to enter.
Problems begin when is necessary working with our solutions, and maybe keeping our bottles opened for hours.
The glove box in this case results very useful. It consist in a hermetically sealed box, in which we can set the experimental conditions we need, in my case the experimental condition is "no oxygen".
Let's give an easy example.
I have to work with 24 serum bottle, with anaerobic solutions.
I'll need pipettes, tips, stoppers and of course of my bottles.
How could I put these materials into the glow box paying attention that air doesn't go inside???
Easy! :)
As you can see from the picture, it has an external smaller box. That's used to exchange material with the environment.
So I'll put everything into the exchanging box, I'll close it and I'll push the button connected to the vacuum pump, pressures depend by the dimension of the box, for the glow box shown in figure, 15 atm is enough.
In this way all the air contained in the little box will be carried away. Generally another system is connected to the glow box to filter and dehumidify the air that is released outside.
At this point I'll fill the exchanging box with another gas different from oxygen, nitrogen for example that presents inert characteristics.
I'll repeat this procedure at least twice, so that I'll be sure that there will be no air inside.
Now I can open the door between the exchanging box and the glove box and carry the instruments inside.
Working with the glove box, on the other hand, isn't so easy because of the huge gloves that aren't so confortable specially if you have to work with little dimensions!
Anyway we just need practice! :)
P.s. Glove box is also useful if we are working with toxic gasses. In this case we want that what is inside stays inside, so all the procedure described should be performed before exchanging materials from the glove box to the environment. Same thing but in the opposite way! :)
I'm searching something like this to avoid the interference of humidity while I'm preparing mixtures of salts. can you tell me the name of the producer? thanks
RispondiEliminaThe one that I'm using is an old model (it doesn't have touch screen display), here you can find new models from the same brand.
RispondiEliminahttp://www.plas-labs.com/GB_890.cfm
This brand didn't give us a lot of problems, we had just to fix very well the gloves, in the last period we also broke an internal handle, but it seems to work well even with this little problem.
Thanks for your comment, hoping that it can be useful for your experiment. :)
Could you please tell me how did you find my blog? :)
i was looking for some information about glow box. In our laboratory we need to prepare some samples of inorganic salts on teflon filter to simulate inorganic particulate present in air and during the deposition presence of humidity be avoided; so searching on google imagine i've found yours that seems to be not too big to be easy placed in our room ;)
RispondiElimina