A Spiffy Way To Clean NMR Tubes

Life in a chemistry lab isn’t always fun and games—chemists must also do their chores, including cleaning out used NMR tubes. Although commercial devices are available for the task, they are expensive glassware and typically only clean one tube or a few at a time. To remedy that problem, Thanh Binh Nguyen of the CNRS Institute of Natural Product Chemistry has devised an NMR tube cleaning system that can handle dozens of tubes at once and only requires a small amount of solvent and equipment already at hand in most labs (Org. Process Res. Dev. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.oprd.6b00001). First, Nguyen empties NMR tubes and places them upside down in a beaker containing solvent or cleaning solution. Nguyen then puts the beaker in a vacuum desiccator, which he evacuates and vents with air several times. The liquid rises and falls with each vacuum cycle, cleaning out the tubes. A final rinse with fresh acetone completes the cleaning. Nguyen says he came up with the idea when his research funds were short. “I had to optimize everything—time, chemicals, human power—and here is one of my solutions.” Early responses on Twitter to Nguyen’s OPR&D paper were mixed: Some commenters questioned publishing the work in an industrial process chemistry journal, noting that industrial chemists often consider NMR tubes as a onetime consumable and toss them out. Plus cleaning them creates more lab waste. But most admit it’s a clever idea.