Totally Tubular
- Jun 22, 2022
- 1 min read
Updated: Jul 16, 2022
Day 10 - June 21
All About Tubes... Lots of Tubes
One of the more interesting samples that we get in the IC lab are sorbent tubes, which come with fillings of either silica gel or charcoal. Sorbent tubes are used to collect and store gas samples for air quality testing. Today, we had an unusually large batch of 29 tubes from one job, and 13 tubes from six others. My job was to open and prep them for the vials.
Unfortunately, opening the tubes is a bit more complicated than just taking off the caps on each end. Since we have to extract the charcoal/silica gel from inside the glass tube, we have to split the tube in two to pour out its contents. So for about two hours, I used a special glass cutting file to saw a notch into each tube and snap it into a 15mL plastic tube that could be capped. After that was done, the fun could begin!
In order to release the good stuff from where it is trapped in the charcoal, we have to add some pretty strong chemicals to react with the charcoal in the tubes. This causes lots of bubbling, smoking and the tubes get pretty hot, which is how you know that science (an exothermic reaction) is really happening! Here is a video of me prepping the tubes:
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