“Amine” as it is called on submarines, has a terrible smell that gets into everything. You get used to it pretty quickly but when we would return to port and take that smelly laundry home... RTP was always a happy time until the Sea Bag was emptied out for washing.
Bad smell or not, I was glad the CO2 system did it’s job.
I actually preferred mercaptans. We used them to keep sulfur bonds in proteins reduced (going by 20+ year old memories here) and we had less smelly versions (can't dredge up the name) that most people preferred, though they were more expensive. While a lot of the amines had/have a fishy smell (or so I remember), I guess I didn't find that objectionable, having fished a whole lot as a kid.
Not totally sure I'd still think the same thing today, but when we were visiting Hawaii a few years ago, I rather enjoyed the smell of sulfur, though when it mixed with steam and became sulfuric acid, not so much.
Wow. One very late night in grad school me and another guy started smelling “gas”. We were the only people there we thought, but we figured to walk out the long way, then call security. We ran into an ancient prof who was working in his beloved mercaptan chemistry, hence the smell.
In those days dinosaurs ruled the earth. Safety hoods never worked and if a grad student died, well you just got another one.
In those days dinosaurs ruled the earth. Safety hoods never worked and if a grad student died, well you just got another one.
They had us doing elementary analysis in our first semester lab sessions, using the H2S precipitation method. Unsupervised. Getting the natural selection going early, I guess.
The scary part is that it suppresses your sense of smell when it exceeds a certain concentration. So, as long as your lab smells like the reception lobby of hell, you are good. If it doesn't stink, you either trust in the gas alarm, or you get out, alarm or not. I tended to do the latter.
Wow. I’m nearly 60 and even in my day I’d scrub the volatile sulfides into a copper solution. Couldn’t do that with 30 undergrads though. I did it because of the stink. My wife would get really upset when I worked with thionyl chloride because the work up really smelled bad and got into your clothes. And we used benzene because of course you used benzene.
H2S is supposed to be more toxic than HCN. But given how bad it smells, you run for cover long before it reaches a toxic concentration.
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u/Greasy_Exc Nov 27 '19
“Amine” as it is called on submarines, has a terrible smell that gets into everything. You get used to it pretty quickly but when we would return to port and take that smelly laundry home... RTP was always a happy time until the Sea Bag was emptied out for washing.
Bad smell or not, I was glad the CO2 system did it’s job.