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Duster
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Cleaning Glassware
I was fairly surprised to find only a handful of posts on this subject when I did a search. I saw cairos acid, acetone, NaOH, and a few others all
mentioned for cleaning glassware... Oh and Piric Acid. But overall, how does one best take care of their glassware?
My first thought was acetone (well, after water) for general cleaning of stubborn substances... Although I suppose a lot depends on what your cleaning
out.
For example, one thing about distilling nitric acid, how do you clean the flask you mixed your acid and nitrate in?
Im sure this comes across as a newbie ish question but I think its important enough to warrent knowledgable anwsers. The last thing Im sure anyone
wants to do is break an expensive piece of complex glassware because they tried to scrub out a substance when a solvet could have gotten it out (this
happened a lot to my chemistry teacher in high school when students would pack in various things in small graduated cylinders and there was no way for
him to get them out).
This shouldnt just apply to simple things like beakers and flasks, what about condensers, and various ground glass adapters? And tricks of the trade
to get these clean?
Thanks for the help.
Duster
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chromium
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Buy some diswashing liquid from local supermarket. Also other types of cleaning liquids like those for cleaning enamel and glass can do wonders.
Use hot water and pieces of old newspaper in it. Shake well and if needed rub with woodstick.
Glass tubes, inluding some of bent tubes, can be cleaned by pulling piece of paper soaked into diswashing liquid and tied to long wire through tube.
I do not know what process you use for nitric acid but i have found that hot water when poured onto saltcake when its not completely solidified yet
will solve the problem.
[Edited on 15-12-2005 by chromium]
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Magpie
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The traditional glassware cleaning solution (at least the one I learned in college) was a hot mixture of sulfuric acid and potassium dichromate. I
used this successfully to clean out the helix tube of a condenser unreachable by any tool for mechanical cleaning.
I currently also have a 250 mL RBF from my nitric acid prepartion that has a waterline of grey plastic-like substance (OTC reactant impurity?). It is
unaffected by acetone. It is not yielding to cold acid/chromate solution. But then again the solution is now green instead of the original orange so
maybe the chromate is spent. Also I have not heated it. If this crud does not yield to hot, fresh acid/chromate I'm thinking that I will have to
burn it out. 
The single most important condition for a successful synthesis is good mixing - Nicodem
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evil_lurker
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I'm kinda fond of TCE brake cleaner myself for any kind of organic residues.
I know the shit works wonders on grease and oils of any kind on metals.
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bio2
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There is a dishwasher machine additive "Glass Magic" for removing cloudy film that contains 21.6% phosphorous as phosphates. Label says contains
sodium metasilicate, sodium tripolyphosphate and active organic chloride (unspecified).
This stuff works well almost as good as the old Alconox when it had high phosphates.
Takes off stubborn mineral deposits with a strong boiling solution that can be used over a few times. May take some hours for the worst residue.
BTW a flask damaged by boiling conentrated NaAcetate has not yielded to any treatment so far. It seems that the glass is perhaps badly etched or
something.
Is there anyway to remove this residue appearing as scales on/in the glass?
I've tried everything I can think of for over a year with no luck!
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BromicAcid
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At my college we use isoclean to clean out basically everything. I've used a mixture of potassium dichromate and sulfuric acid but never needed it
hot, a drop on a paper towel will char it so I figured it works good for removing organics of all kinds. I saw no mention of NaOH dissolved in EtOH
so far, it's fairly strong. Personally elbow grease does it for me every time, I take stout metal wire and put a scouring pad on the end or glass
wool or anything and pick at stuck on material. But of course it all depends on the stain.
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Natures Natrium
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I found a rather simple method of cleaning the inside of flasks and other pieces where it is very difficult to reach with any sort of tool is to take
and dump a good quantity of table salt in (about 1/10 volume) and pour in enough acetone to leave a puddle above the salt. Then, shake like hell.
Ive found this to be an easy way to remove even that brown manganate stain left over by permanganate oxidations, and the scrubbing action of the salt
removes tars and other nasty junk that wont dissolve in any solvent. Its quick, easy, and clean up is a breeze; just dump the bulk of the
NaCl/acetone out and rinse the glass out with water. Instead of acetone one can use water with an excess of salt (cheaper, more enviro-friendly), but
I find that it is less effective than with acetone.
\"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.\" - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
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DrP
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Never tried salt and acetone - think I might next time I get something stuck in some glassware.
We used to use a strong HCL acid bath (let soak for a few days) followed by a rinsing and then a base bath - NaOH/IPA/H2O This was quite effective
but I never really liked having these baths sitting either side of the sink - people would just let stuff build up ib them. Our post doc said they
removed the surface hydroxyls from the glass so as not to interfere with the reactions he was doing. (?)
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fizzy
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This site http://www.crscientific.com/cleaning-glassware.html recommends KOH or NaOH in alcohol.
If you look around that site you will find some interesting low level experiments. I particularly like the one about detecting urea in stinky gym
socks.
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lacrima97
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I know that H2SO4+H2O2--->H2SO5?+H2O has dissolved cloth, and I have used it at work before for cleaning out the pans that the dumb cooks burnt up.
That mix was the only thing that could ever get that charring off.
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ADP
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I know that H2SO4 + H2O2 --> H2SO5 + H2O at temperatures lower than 10 degress celcius but I'm not sure what happens at higher temps. I'm sure that
between the oxidizing power of H2O2 and the dehydration power of H2SO4 it would remove the toughest gunk and grime.
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chromium
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Oxalic acid can be used to remove manganese oxides that are left from peramnganate oxidations. Just did this with great success. I used toiletry
cleaning fluid that is essentially mix of detergents and oxalic acid. Left to stand for night and all MnO2 dissolved without any mechanical action.
[Edited on 25-12-2005 by chromium]
[Edited on 25-12-2005 by chromium]
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NJF
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I find that lots of hot water and gentle scrubbing will remove most things, IF the stain is easily accessable. If not, try boiling the glass in a pan
of water for an hour, that gets most things off in my experience.
Acidic oxidisers should be good for organics, as others have mentioned, but save dichromates for more interesting purposes. Try persulphate PCB
etchant with some sulphuric acid, or Fenton's, or something like that. I wouldn't like to regularly use hydroxides for cleaning glass, it might make
all your stuff go gradually cloudy (I like my glass shiny  ). Although it would
be very gradual, and wouldn't really matter unless you were using diazomethane or something (on a side note, have you seen glass for work with
diazomethane? Flame-polished glass joints are sexy).
Some of the nastiest stains are from transition metals. Hydroxides and oxides can get ppted right onto your glass, and they can be a real bitch to get
off. I have never tried, but something like really hot sodium thiosulphate solution might work.
Glass for high vacuum work is commonly cleaned by boiling it in nitric acid, and if you want REALLY CLEAN glass, put it in a belljar, pump it down to
a few mBar, and apply RF power liberally. Nothing cleans glass like atomic oxygen at 30000*C .
Formerly \"Nick F.\"
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The_Davster
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I also use just lots of water and mild scrubbing for most things, but when I am working with metal oxides those do not come off well at all so I just
use the acid waste from nitrations of various phenols. I then use HCl if the waste acid does not take off whatever stain. Under extreme
circumstances I will very gently use steel wool to get off a stain, but I do not like exposing my glass to such things.
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neutrino
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>I do not like exposing my glass to such things.
What’s the problem with steel wool? Glass is generally harder than ordinary steels, so there shouldn’t be any scratching.
When cleaning <b>really</b> stubborn stains that nothing else will touch (like oil baked on at 300*C), I’ve often resorted to
<i>very</i> hard scrubbing with steel wool. I have cleaned a certain Petri dish like this at least a dozen times and have yet to notice
any damage. (Except to the joint in my fingers.) 
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lordmagnus
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Simple green works well to remove allot of stubborn stains, for baked on goop, or mineral deposits I use (super IRON OUT) sulfamic acid powder, you
can make a pretty strong mix to soak a really bad spot for several hours, smells like ass though, and you need some ventilation with it, then I run
glassware through the dishwasher with some citric acid crystals, and some sheeting agent for hte final rinse usally.
I\'ll kill a man in a fair fight, or if I think he is gonna start a fair fight, or if he\'s bothrn me allot, or if I am getin payed good, or probably
over a good woman.
-Jayne Cobb (Serenity) |
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neutrino
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What exactly is this 'green'?
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Magpie
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IIRC Simple Green contains butyl cellosolve. Cellosolves have the form: HOCH2CH2OR. No wonder that cleaner works so well.
The single most important condition for a successful synthesis is good mixing - Nicodem
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Hexavalent
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I recently did a steam distillation of orange peels to recover limonene, but, unfortunately, due to the heat of the hotplate some of the solid matter
burned and stuck like hell to the inside of my new 19/26 1ltr boiling flask.
I emptied everything out, cleaned it with water and then added sand, followed by some more water.
This worked wonders - the boiling water pushed the sand around which lifted the stains and residues in no time!
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
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Lambda-Eyde
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I prefer using marble chips (used for generating CO<sub>2</sub> and a
little dab of soap. Works absolutely wonderful, plus it doesn't scratch and the pieces are so large there's no problem getting it all out compared to
fine-grained sand.
Edit: 19/26 is IMO a small joint for a 1L flask!
[Edited on 7-1-2012 by Lambda-Eyde]
This just in: 95,5 % of the world population lives outside the USA
Please drop by our IRC channel: #sciencemadness @ irc.efnet.org
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Hexavalent
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I bought a job lot of used taper joint glassware on eBay, everything was 19/26, including the mentioned flask, my 60mm liebig and all of the claisen
adapters, still heads etc.
It is a nice size to have IMO - Goldilocks - not to big, OK for microscale stuff, not to small, nice for bulk solvent production.
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
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Sedit
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Use dirt, sounds funny but sand a little detergent and water into a semi thick slurry will slowly take off even the most stuborn caked on things with
alot of shaking.
Knowledge is useless to useless people...
"I see a lot of patterns in our behavior as a nation that parallel a lot of other historical processes. The fall of Rome, the fall of Germany — the
fall of the ruling country, the people who think they can do whatever they want without anybody else's consent. I've seen this story
before."~Maynard James Keenan
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peach
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What you use to clean it depends largely on what it is that's stuck in it.
There's no point using piranha and aqua regia if a squirt of acetone will do. Conversely, some of it is not going to come out with anything bar an
option like that. E.g. one of the glass manufacturers recommends baking the glass at 480C in oxygen to remove free carbon.
It also depends what that thing is stuck to.
If it's a conical flask, getting in there with a scrubby brush on a stick is easy and fairy liquid (washing up soap) or biological washing liquid will
work beautifully. Some bits of complicated micro glass, a scrubby stick is not going to physically fit in there.
Sintered glass is the biggest pain in the ass to clean, as the sinter is effectively a sponge to soak up crud, but an unsqueezable sponge.
Think about what is stuck to the glass, and then what might be the best way to remove it. E.g. metals, you can dissolve to a water soluble form with
your acid of choice, greasy organic muck (like charred oil), that is a specialty of biological washing liquid. The same big name glass company also
recommends using domestic dishwasher powders and liquids as an alternative to the propriety laboratory cleaners.
There are varying options based on how clean you need it to be. If I were filtering something for chromatography, I'd want the glass sparkly. Other
times, it doesn't matter if it's grubby since what's going on is grubby to begin with and is inevitably going to need tidying up afterwards.
[Edited on 8-1-2012 by peach]
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Neil
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I've had interesting luck with hot 30% H2O2 + fresh iron hydroxide for removing waxy organic residues from flasks and sintered glass. It is slow
though.
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Hexavalent
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Failing all of above, you decide to use a piranha solution. What composition is best?
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
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