De(lab)acles
I have always been enchanted with working in a lab with all the perplexing equipments with bizarre looking gadgets and fixtures and TU Darmstadt has totally fulfilled this fantasy of mine. Also here, the ‘lab culture’, if you can call it so, is entirely different from that in Indian colleges. A person who’s carrying out research is generally given a common key which can open almost all the labs in the Material Science department (where I am working currently). This noble gesture however assumes that the person who works in a particular lab has at least an exposure at the most basic level possible to the equipment he is using. My case is a bit different, since am neither a full time student (to give complete hands on training) nor a short term resident (to let others do the job for me), this assumption is not obeyed in its entirety. I have been given only a crash course on using some equipments and so its almost like ‘on-the-job-training’ for me when it comes to using them and considering my marvelous memory, the probability of a lab scale disaster is definitely not a negligible number.
Except for the furnaces (which are relatively dangerous but extremely failsafe), the other equipments I use are pretty simple to operate and any person who s undergone this crash course should be in a position to use it without wreaking havoc on lab property. I was in this normal category of persons until today when I successfully opened my account for glass breakages.
On one of the equipments I use (called the BET surface area determinator), a glass tube needs to be fixed, then the air inside it sucked out and then it must be filled with Helium gas. Following the established protocols, the air was sucked out and next the helium had to be filled. I switched off the vacuum first and then turned on the helium gas. The next thing I saw was my tube lying shattered into various sized fragments – definitely not a pleasant sight. The helium gas seemed to have blown apart the tube. Not being accustomed to this kind of misbehavior from the equipment, I was shocked for a moment and then recovered to clean up the mess.
Since I had to start this experiment today, I decided I would use a second tube and start again. Luckily I had not gone much into the experiment and I could set it up all again in a jiffy. Working swiftly, I got the new tube cleaned, fixed and started sucking out the air again. Soon enough I was back at the point where disaster had occurred. This time, trying to be extra careful, I started opening the helium gas valve VERY slowly (to quote the exact figure, 10.59 seconds, a bit too much considering that I just had to pull down a lever). It worked. I crossed the disaster step successfully. Happy now, I proceeded to quickly unscrew the tube from its holding fixture and tried to remove the tube. ‘Plop’ came a sound and I saw the tube nose diving at a speed at which Atlantis reenters the earth’s atmosphere, towards the floor. Apparently the speed was way too high for my reflexes to act in time. Result, disaster repeated. Loss count of glass tubes damaged raised to 2.
Sensing an emergency, I rushed to Jens (my PhD guide here and my 911 contact as well) and explained the ‘abnormal’ functioning of the machine. Jens listened patiently and explained then. ‘YOU must HOLD the tube while you remove it because helium tends to have an overpressure’. It dawned on me then, I had always followed those instructions – till today. Today had been an exception. Evidently, the doppelt espresso I had after lunch had turned out ineffective in combating the afternoon siesta and the mathematics of probability held true!
jens must be pissed off with indians on the whole first me and now u.. i spoiled XRD
he he he….he certainly is but managed to just shrug it off with ‘its just glass don bother’