Ok so it went down like this…don don don
I was finishing a long distillation and it was late at night. I had just weighed and bottled the product and began to clean the lab.I started breaking the apparatus down to solvent wash before soaking, when I came up with the bright idea that some warm solvent in a wash bottle was just the ticket to get out of there and sleep for what was rest of the night. Admittingly… and I am not proud to say this, It was a practice that I had imbibed upon a few occasions…Cough …The acetone we were using prior for washing was a cheaper grade usually… Only this time the supplier had changed and the acetone was significantly more pure than the washing solvent I had used in the past for in this exact procedure.
So You all can probably guess what happened next? Yep, that bottle of acetone went in the ol’ microwave! So with the top of the wash bottle removed filled 1/3 of the way I put her in for 3 min, much longer than I expected to boil, but hey… Id watch it and stop it when it boiled right? I walked over to the lab bench for a second just to check on something, then came right back to the wash bottle to see it it it was boiling. It should have been boiling by then, that confused me. As I approached the microwave sort of perplexed to the reason it has not shown any boiling the microwave exploded.I was sprayed with acetone vapor and liquid, and the door hit me. I stood in awe. When It took me a few minuets to connect the dots as to why this has happened. Luckily nothing was ignited, I probably would have been burned to shit by that. What had happened was the purer grade of solvent became super heated, then boiled instantly. The evolving vapor popped a perfect bubble in the side of the wash bottle right at the liquid level in the bottle, it didn’t distort the bottle in the slightest at the top. The microwave looked like the hulk grabbed the top and bottom and ripped them apart, then threw the door. The fact that super boiling can cause that sort of expansion is incredible
Lesson of the day kids, don’t microwave solvents, probably something I wouldn’t ever have to warn you about because only irrational people perform behavior like that…