Guidance gathered for working with lithium aluminum hydride

Lithium aluminum hydride (LAH) is a strong reducing agent used to make myriad molecules. But LAH reacts violently with water to form hydrogen gas, which can cause fires and explosions. While chemists could find reports of these incidents in various publications, until now there was no single resource that detailed the best practices for handling LAH.

A new publication in ACS Chemical Health and Safety pulls that information into a single resource for chemists working in academic labs (2024, DOI: 10.1021/acs.chas.3c00102).

“This is a guidance document,” says Tilak Chandra, a chemical safety specialist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who coauthored the article with his colleague Jeffrey Zebrowski. Chemists can use the information in this publication to develop a standard operating procedure for the reaction they plan to do, Chandra says.

“There’s a lot of information out there. It’s just a matter of packaging the information in a useful format in one place,” Zebrowski says of the publication. “We’re not inventing this stuff.”

The publication gives chemists several tools for working with LAH. It outlines how to best prepare glassware for a reaction with LAH, how to weigh the chemical and add it to a reaction vessel, and how to safely dispose of small excess amounts of it. The publication also has an emergency checklist to review before working with LAH. “Our big message is: make sure you do a proper risk assessment,” Zebrowski says.