Future 4200 im trying to solve the mystery of where Ethylene Oxide is getting into my crude. I run -40 ethanol. using a delta centerfigue. I use Nitrogen to push the solvent. Running through falling films. I have eliminated all aluminum kegs. I cant seem to figure it out. Thanks for any suggestions, Ill dig into any help I can get.
First post also, I apologize if I haven’t followed protocol.
Kind regards
What chiller fluid you rockin?
Ethylene Oxide?
I doubt that analytical.
Maybe Ethylene Glycol from chiller fluid that is misnamed?
Ethylene Oxide is the stuff of fuel air bombs and processing nightmares.
Usually made by the partial catalytic oxidation of ethylene under scary conditions.
It’s prob a aluminized oxide from pgr regulators. Those are spiked chemicals that come up differently on tests sometimes.
Whenever I have weird stuff happen to me I always start with a supplier check for all my inputs. I agree with the others that this is not something you should randomly see.
I’ve also totally seen random contaminates come to me via tanked gasses from confused/slacking suppliers. That would be where I checked. How is the tank labeled? Did it come with a COA? If its got a lot of different labels on it (it shouldn’t…) perhaps you got a tank that had some contamination in it.
You could always test the gas to see, just in case.
And I’d ask to see the chromatography from the analytics as well. It should come off at the very beginning of the analytics run and has three characteristic ions that are different than the other compounds that elute at close to the same retention times.
How many tests over what time period?
Have you tried another lab?
Let’s see those chromatograms…
For reactors we use propylene glycol. Falling Film we use water
not sure about the -40 chiller, but we did have it tested for leaks and didnt find any. We thought that was the cause originally.
We had it tested by 2 labs. One lab consistently has it in our residual solvents. The other lab barely detects at times and other times, no detection of the ethylene ox.
I have not checked in with my supplier on this. Thank you for this response. Great Idea, never considered it just because its food grade.
This has been an ongoing issue for close to 8 months. We have tried two labs for testing. I have dozens of tests from all different stages of the process to try to pinpoint where its entering. I have not checked the nitrogen as a contaminate yet. Great suggestion.
Ill check if I can share some tests, company policy and all.
have you seen the chromatograms? (maybe. especially if you’ve been at this for months…). most labs don’t include them in the results you get. they should provide them if requested.
they won’t mean a whole lot to me, as I’ve only done residual solvents testing on an SRI-GC FID, but there are some folks with lots of analytical experience on here, and those chromatograms are the data…rather than just the labs interpretation of the data (which is what the reports the customer gets really are).
listing exactly where you’ve tested for it and either found/not found might also help folks help you.
Meaning if I have trace heavy metals in my biomass? Like cadmium picked up in the soil and present in the plant? Interesting. Ill look into if our levels could be the cause of this. We are organic, but still have heavy metals in the soil.
Ive tested for it post Falling Film and found trace levels. The levels seem to intensify over time in the reactor.
latest falling film test had 3.5 ug/g ethylene ox
7.9 ug/g ethylene ox in last reactor test, residual ethanol was at 491ug/g.
yeah from what I remember EO is insanely reactive.
Years ago in college I worked for a specialty chemicals manufacturer that did massive reactions with ethylene and propylene oxide. (Not a huge operation like Dow or someone like that but big enough that they transported materials in and out on rail cars.) Both EO and PO were stored underground, chilled, and about three football fields away from the reactor buildings!
The aluminized oxides are present with the concentrations of metalized stabilizers in the pgr process. I’m not a specialist but I’ve heard pgr grows have weird combinations of oxides from the aluminized chemical bonds that are used with pgr chemical production.
Did they by chance mean polyethylene oxide (totally different)?
no its 2 big labs and standard testing. Def ethylene oxide.
no its 2 big labs and standard testing. Def ethylene oxide.
know this post is kind of old but we just had a similar issue. EO is commonly used as a sanitizing agent of plastics.
IE- The plastic tubes we were submitting the crude in where at one point sanitized in EO and there would occasionally be some residual in them that would cause a pop. It’s commonly used in syringes to.
Hope this helps
We accidentally got an EO sterilizer from a bidspotter auction that was listed as an autoclave. We’ve been fiddling with it a bit and from the literature I assumed EO was extremely volatile and would purge quite easily. After all, if it sticks around on your petri dishes, the plating results probably wouldn’t mean much lol