So I am now gradually clearing old samples, some of them 20 years old, out of the #glovebox. I had kind of assumed that they were mostly dead.
Not quite. A few grams of brown NaMeCp caught fire after 5 or 6 minutes in air. And two samples of K4Si4 went off with a flash/bang when I dropped them into a wet beaker. More are waiting. #yikes

Depressing to think of the embodied emissions, but at least no one else has to deal with the surprises in future… #chemistry #academiclife #shitejihad

And so my #glovebox is is undead!! Atmosphere well below 5 ppm of oxygen. Now the cleanup begins.

The spots are a very sensitive organometallic compound used as an indicator. Green is good. Orange is baaaaaad. #chemistry #academiclife

I return to my #glovebox to discover that the catalyst heated but the gas did not flow through at all - the flow rate seemed correctly set at the start. Does this mean that there's a deeper problem still lurking?

A whole day wasted. I'll have to try again tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

#Glovebox purged with 100 bar (7 m3 of nitrogen). Now the catalyst is heating up waiting for its nitrogen/hydrogen feed to reduce it down and activate it. We might have a working box by morning.

And then the shite jihad will begin. Time to clear out a lot of ancient samples and abandoned schlenks. There's a fair bit of rather manky white phosphorus and alkali metal in there so there may be some fun to be had…  #chemistry #academiclife