Pump options for pentane.

buna is fine with pentane in the aodd.
get a stainless or aluminum body and make sure you ground your pump body to earth.

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Shouldent need it unless you absolutely need a consistent liquid velocity.

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Sorry to resurrect a dead threadā€¦ but looking at material compatibility tablesā€¦ Stainless Steel and pentane is rated as C: Fair. I donā€™t know that I believe it, but Cole Parmer is typically on point. Their definition for Fair rating below.

C - Fair: Moderate Effect, not recommended for continuous use. Softening or loss of strength, and swelling may occur.

Do any of you guys have first-hand experience with Stainless / Pentane? Just looking to confirm/deny Cole Parmers ratingā€¦

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Supposedly some steel types are worse than others. I had a debate with another chemist here about whether this is true. Itā€™s unresolved, noone had any actual data
Edit: lol debate was in this thread haha

Ha ha ha, thanks for chiming in broken_glassware. Iā€™m not one to disregard dataā€¦ but this ā€œfeelsā€ surprising to me. Hoping someone else might have some first-hand experience?

How far are you pumping? Is there any reason that dry compressed air would not work?

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Here is a chart listing 316 with an ā€œAā€ rating.


here is the link. https://marketing.industrialspec.com/acton/attachment/30397/f-003a/1/-/-/-/-/316l-stainless-steel-chemical-compatibility-from-ism.pdf
Id be curious to know the method of chemical attack that Cole Pharmers researchers observed.

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Wilden are considered innovators in the air driven pump world, everyone sackrides their moves. They have ptfe, santoprene, saturated nitrile and a whole variety of proprietary chem duty blends for frisbees and balls. Also a ton of body options. The .25" metering pumps they have are rad too. Southern California company.

the biggest mistakes i see with AOD pumps are bad fastner practices on PTFE bodied units. If you deform then youā€™re screwed.

yeah ss body for the win!

Thanks for the alternate info, Iā€™ve that makes me feel a little better about SS and Pentane.

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Iā€™ve been monitoring all the stainless steel in my facility that contacts pentane. Havent seen any major deforming BUT I suspect it does weaken it somewhat, and I swear I can detect a little ā€œmetallynessā€ to things after pentane that spent a lot of time on stanless steel has evaporated off.
Regular stainless steel pans I believe are fine, since a little deforming is no biggie, however, I wouldnt bet on regular 316 SS as a bearing in contact with pentane, or any other mission critical metal piece in contact, iā€™d go with 317 SS for something like that.
Anyone else see or not see damage?

Also, have a problem with a tiny bit of salt water droplets making it into the steel pentane drums and rusting them like crazyā€¦ but thats a bit of a different issue lol

I have been wondering if steel is so bad with Pentane then why do they ship it in a steel drum? Anyone have an answer to that?

Couldnt you just have the crystallization tank on load cells? So you can measure mass of both distillate and pentane and extrapolate volume from that?

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whatever you choose, make sure to ground both sides - what youre filling into, and what your filling from. Pentane has very poor manners.

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It doesnā€™t straight eat through steel but some grades of steel might be easier to deform in pentane so bearings would need replacement more often etc, even the steel grades that. Are rated poor for pentane are like a C not a D or F

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I donā€™t believe that compatibility table, full stop (and another one was already posted contradicting it). You are not going to run into a random ass defiance of a trend like propane, butane, hexane, heptane all being ā€œAā€ but pentane being ā€œCā€. Pentane is stored in steel in indefinite periods. And a nonpolar chemical like pentane is not going to have some electric interaction other alkanes donā€™t that allows it to somehow attack metals. I swear some person at cole accidentally transposed the results from another material into that row, and then every other ā€œindependentā€ table just copied the results from that first one. Ask a metallurgy company about it and i bet you will get a different answer.

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Iā€™ve shared this so many times, and Iā€™ll keep doing it.

Pentane pump is rated to -100C

https://www.nboler.com/collections/all/products/explosion-proof-transfer-pump-pneumatic

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Have you asked a metalurgy company about it?

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Sure. Here is a chart from one such company, which marks pentane (and all alkanes) as having an ā€œAā€ rating with all steel types. I can provide over 10 such charts that list it as A or Excellent. This at least should lead us to take a position of skepticism regarding this supposed incompatibility.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.balseal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/bal_seal_metallic_materialsTR_60C.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwilu83asc7sAhXKHDQIHTTZAWAQFjAOegQICRAB&usg=AOvVaw3SkL39b0cinfxJiBdtoZGp

Iā€™ve reached out to an alloy manufacturing group to ask this question explicitly; awaiting answers now.

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