that would be the most likely (only one I can think of) explanation.
take them out regenerate them, and figure out where your water came from.
the next step (drying your solvent), is not clear. You want to pass your solvent over your sieves, but you don’t want things to heat up too much.
having not encountered this, I’m not willing to tell you to just run your solvent over your freshly regenerated beads, and not worry about the heat generated. I don’t believe you can generate enough heat to get into trouble, but I also don’t have anything to actually base that on.
according to the engineering toolbox, the auto-ignition temperature of butane is 405C (higher than ethanol!), so chances are you’d have a really hard time getting this to go boom by getting your molsieves wet.
Setting a vacuum oven to 300F will generally cause it to get quite warm (300F or thereabouts).
If it wasn’t safe for ovens to get that warm, giving the user the ability to set them there would seem quite irresponsible.
What are you actually worried about.
If the sieves are dry, and you add water, they will get warm. You’re not ADDing water in the vac oven, so the only heat involved is that which you are deliberately adding?
That your oven is going to explode because you got butane hot? Where is the butane coming from?
I was worried that the extra heat generated from the warm oven could damage my other equipment or room. Short and catch fire would be the second concern. You are right, seems weird to be able to set the oven that high if that is not safe. I have never seen one that hot in person so was intimidated to set it and see what happened. Thanks for imparting some confidence, I appreciate the reply.
Does anyone have any tips for determining service interval on molsieves used for pulling water from reclaimed CDA-12?
Given parts on hand the best I’ve got is based on the exotherm.
Measured aliquot of fresh sieves.
Add measured aliquot of “working solvent”…if temp goes up there is still water in “working solvent”. Magnitude of temp increase presumably diagnostic of “water content”
Measured aliquot of “working sieves”, add known amount of water. If temp raises, sieves are “still good”. Magnitude of temp increase also presumably informative.
Proofing gauge on order, time on GC/TCD to confirm is a possibility.
a potty it can t hit 625C that would make some great magsil