I 100% agree on all your points, and you touch on a very important topic: Uniforms/apparel.
Every cGMP facility/properly designed facility I’ve seen, with all the proper discharge flooring and safety protocols in place… has employees that regularly bypass safety measures for comfort or ease.
Many producers require employees to wear scrubs, cover-alls, and other PPE/sanitation equipment. @Mr.Clean 's facility goes as far to have ESD considerations for techs, which I love!
However, what happens when the c1d1 is too cold and employees sneak a wool sweater or puffy jacket so they can survive the 8 hour shift in a 50F room?
Employers need to take into consideration safety, comfort, and laziness of employees. For example: providing safe and compliant jackets would be a great idea.
Another factor to consider: Ionizer guns are super fun to use. I never had problems with people forgetting.
1000%. These are easily solved issues when you do a hazard analysis and remediate the root causes.
Issue: It’s cold in our C1D1 so workers will wear wooly/fuzzy jackets.
Solution: Set up a fire pit in the corner so no-one gets cold. It’s not rocket surgery people!
Or…yeah, what you said, give 'em a jacket that’s safe. We provide hoodies with our logo that are 100% cotton. Wearing anything that’s not safe in the C1D1 would be a write-up. It also comes from management, safety standards need to be ENFORECED AND CHECKED, writing 'em down does dick-all if you don’t keep on it.
It’s just, like, ya know, some guns are nerf guns is all. You still don’t typically bring a nerf gun in to work, but it is practically harmless. Intrinsically safe flashlights are higher risk than a waterproof flipbrick, purely because they have a lightbulb, greater thermal output, and watt density.
Really I’m just saying we should all go back to dumb-phones, unplug, tune in, drop out, all that shenaynay.
All of the testing lab equipment sat unused for a year while they paid those payments. They didn’t have MS but they had HPLCs for every facility. That alone was fucking nuts.
From a theoretical standpoint the thermal temp rise of the motor in that situation would be less than the ignition temp and a safety factor.
The much more significant issue would be loss of airflow to the hazardous location. How do you get rid of the hundreds of pounds of solvent you go through per unit time? It is likely it gets diluted into the continuous stream of fresh air flowing through the haz location and out of the building. So what keeps the atmosphere of the haz location below lower explosive limits (LEL)? Dilution with air flow?
Static is bad news, but even the most energetic static discharges no not cause combustion if the area is below the lower explosive limit.
I would agree if settings where never changed but right the moment one takes off a cap, hose or valve small amounts yet in concentrations above lel occurre and things can go gnarly
Seen a centrifuge caught fire deu to static when opening up
Guy reaches for the lid lifts it up 30Cm and whooshhhg fire in the fuge
This is with petroleum ether as extraction solvent so not very comon
But ventilation was on par his polyester clothing and a watch at his wrist was not
With a certain angle of light you can see a vapor (water) fall come out of the fuge that second it gets opened
So yeah there are still moments in well ventilated area s that can behave differently
Although I’m 90% sure the one I’m running now was used for pentane by its previous owner.
Use N2. pull the basket to learn how it seals. Sealing is non-trivial.
Favor a fuge with cone in the basket, because it has a cone in the bowl. It’s more likely to stay sealed, or at least your solvent is less likely to wash out your lube.
Don’t flood. Spray wash.
Or talk to @Lincoln20XX (pretty sure he used heptane)
I’ve seen a few booths where the fan motor was outside of the control area and spun the fan via a belt that passed thru the fan housing. So the motor could fail in a nasty way without exposing the potential mixture in the booth/fan body/exhaust tubing to ignition temps, unfortunately that motor failing would also mean no air circulation and IIRC, it wasn’t a redundant system.
Hopefully your employees or their manager notices that it’s making a god-awful bearing noise before that happens, but I don’t think any of the booth manufacturers exactly optimize for how badly run some (broke) labs are in this industry, and at least one I know of that catered to the cannabis industry went out of business here in CO
Solvents are solvents, fuges are fuges. Make sure to CYA on seals, material compatibility, static buildup/discharge, and inerting protocol.
We ran heptane in an “ethanol” fuge in a c1d1 booth, doing something like 15 loads of biomass per hour, and I don’t believe the LEL sensor ever went off in regular operations.
Pretty sure we bent the frame of that fuge, but that wasn’t the heptane’s fault.
I run petroleum ether in fuge s
With and without cones
I hate cones but @cyclopath has a point
About less chance of leaking
I also raised the liquid exit ball valve to keep a 1” solvent in the fuge at all times to cool the seal
Hello where can we see such a setup for spray washing?
This is sure a 1000times better way to do it and also you have sure less solvent recovery… @Roguelab pointed this out to me…
Thank you…
