Guidelines and good lab practices protect personnel and results
In the department of chemistry at Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, someone heated unknown chemicals to 400° Celsius in an oven. That heating created toxic fumes that started to escape. As Emad Yousif and his colleagues noted, the lab manager turned off the oven, “notified everyone in the laboratory, and told them to evacuate the building immediately using the emergency exit.”1 An incident like this should remind all scientists to know and follow the guidelines for lab air quality.
The responsibility for that problem came from a student making a bad decision. For one thing, Yousif and his colleagues pointed out, “all chemists must refer to [Safety Data Sheets (SDS)] before conducting any chemical reaction or treatment.” The sample in the oven in this example, for instance, included chromium nitrate, which decomposes at 100 °C, far below the temperature reached. This compound probably burned far below the maximum temperature reached in that oven. Combined with other chemicals, the burning released toxic fumes.
As Yousif and his colleagues concluded: “It is mandatory for all researchers, students, and workers in any chemical laboratory to carefully read the SDS before performing any experiment, especially when it comes to thermal treatment of chemicals, as it is extremely dangerous to use elevated temperatures with highly combustible materials.”
Beyond preventing big mistakes in a lab, managers must also ensure that everyday air is safe. That can be accomplished in several ways.
Going with the guidelines
A variety of air-quality guidelines can help a lab manager maintain the proper environment. Many sources provide useful information.
The U.S. Department of Labor publishes various standards. For instance, Standard 1910.1000 addresses air contaminants and exposure levels for employees in general, including scientists. Table Z-1 of this standard provides a list of contaminants and exposure limits.
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) also publishes guidelines. NFPA 45 provides guidance on how hoods should be constructed, maintained, and tested. Without the proper design and maintenance, hoods cannot be expected to help maintain the quality of air in a lab.
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) created “The American National Standard for Laboratory Ventilation” (ANSI/AIHA Z9.5), which sets requirements for ventilation to protect people working in a lab. This includes design, installation, operation, maintenance, and more for ventilation systems.
Air for accuracy
Beyond the safety of lab personnel, the quality of the air can also impact some analytical platforms. As an example, mass spectrometry (MS) that uses ambient ionization offers many benefits, including easy sample preparation and sensitive measurement capabilities, but this technology also includes some challenges.
One of those challenges—as noted by Sambhav Kumbhani, a postdoctoral chemistry scholar at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues—is “the potential impacts of indoor air contaminants on ionization and analysis involving open-air methods.”2 These scientists studied the impact of volatile organic compounds on three forms of ambient-ionization MS: extractive electrospray ionization (EESI), direct analysis in real time (DART), and ionization by piezoelectric direct discharge (PDD) plasma, and all “were demonstrated in this study to be affected by indoor air contaminants.” The researchers added: “These unexpected indoor air contaminants are capable of more than 75% ion suppression of target analytes due to their high volatility, proton affinity, and solubility compared with the target analytes.”
As these examples indicate, both designers and managers of labs—as well as personnel—play crucial roles in keeping the air in the lab safe. The right air quality is also needed to produce accurate results from some analytical platforms. The procedures that must be followed impact lab life on a daily basis.
References
- Yousif, E.; Al-Dahhan, W.H. et al. Mind what you put in a furnace: a case study for a laboratory incident. J. Environ. Sci. Public Health 2017; 1, 56– 61.
- Kumbhani, S.R.; Wingen, L.M. et al. A cautionary note on the effects of laboratory air contaminants on ambient ionization mass spectrometry measurements. Rapid Commun. Mass Spectom. 2017; doi: 10.1002/rcm.7951.