A few of the articles in this week's issue of C&EN:
- Cover story: Mitch Jacoby writes on this year's Priestly Medal winner, Mostafa El-Sayed.
- Professor El-Sayed, in his own words.
- Andy Brunner on the chemistry of chocolate.
- Celia Henry Arnaud, talking to professors who are redesigning laboratory classes to perform more research (including friend of the blog, Prof. Matthew Hartings).
- Interesting letter to the editor about using ice in laboratory rotovap chillers, instead of dry ice.
Regarding the recent rotavap chiller suggestions, I've always expected that purpose-built recirculating chillers (pumping 50:50 ethylene glycol-water) was an absolute standard for research labs. Surely the running cost/efficiency of those trumps any other "manual ice" method.
ReplyDeleteThis works when the vacuum and bath temp are always adjusted to the evaporated solvent. DCM at 20 mmHg is a gas down to -40C and dry ice is the only practical medium to condense it.
ReplyDeleteI recall Buchi R-300 has an optional HMI module with this capability. The key word is "optional", which means very few installed rotavaps have it, and it can be easily bypassed.
Tl;dr: Yes, but only when the circulator, vac pump, and bath are integrated with a difficult-to-bypass dial-by-solvent controller.