I am working with a robotic workstation that does liquid/solid dispensing, heating, photo-chemistry, and pipetting, and can transfer well-plates to a plate reader for measurements.
One of the issues I’m facing is that we can’t install snorkel vents, or fit the setup in a fume hood. In 1.5 years, we will be able to move it into a walk-in fume hood.
I am wondering if anyone else has been in this situation or has suggestions for how to do chemistry in this kind of setup. Do you stick with aqueous? Has anyone tried to doing polymerizations? The issue is primarily the lack of ability to use chemicals that can be in open-air without a fumehood.
1 Like
Ah, so the limitation is on the safety side and not on air sensitivity of the reactions.
If there’s a fumehood nearby, there may be a way to have a snorkel vent of sorts with a compressor feeding directly to the fumehood. Likewise, you could have a fan/compressor going from a closed chamber (e.g., Opentrons liquid handler) to the fumehood, and try to seal the wellplates before transferring to the plate reader.
Do you have some photos of the setup and a description of the workflow involving that equipment you could share?
I think Jason Hattrick-Simpers also dealt with this in one of his setups. As an aside, I think generally you want to have vent ports located at the bottom of a chamber rather than at the top.
There are also some tent-like enclosures that could be used, that are a bit like portable walk-in fumehoods. Not sure if something like this would be enough though. I remember looking into these a while back and have it buried somewhere in emails I think - lmk if you’d like me to dig it up.