The project of the day was to track down pesticide grade hexanes in Senegal since the only grade in the lab is standard reagent grade. It looks as if there is none in Senegal. It would take at least 2 weeks to ship it, probably more since most of the companies we have contacted, including Fisher seem to take their sweet time answering inquiries. Also, the french websites are not as nicely laid out as the American ones and they are not the same product numbers, so it took a very long time to do to say the least. We did happen upon some pesticide grade ethyl acetate which will work great for standards in the mean time. Baba, Anna, and I spent a lot of time working this out so far.
We ran into a problem with the rotovaps and our glassware but found a solution. The rotovaps have a larger fitting than the round bottom flasks we shipped over previously. Adama found an adapter in a storage room and it works. The problem is that we only have one....so only one operational rotovap. This will increase blow down time unfortunately. We will search harder for another fitting. We have been steadily baking what glassware we can until the new oven arrives.
I'm still running into degradation in the inlet of our third PRC dibutylchlorendate. I re-did the liner for the front inlet, but kept the back the same to compare. It does look much better than before but the dibutylchlorendate is still a problem. Maybe we should not use it. I will be able to better evaluate the situation once we make a standard of the analytes (14 components).
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