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Boiling Chips
Boiling Chips
If you are really trying to stay pure, there are at least 4 kinds of
substances that boiling chips are made of:
glass, ceramics of various oxides (aluminum oxide included most often),
pure carbon in a glassy form, and porous white virgin DuPont's Teflon (TM).
You get to think through what the possible bad effects might be.
Glass and ceramics are always soluble in water to some really low
concentration,
enough that the glass would be pitted and foggy and the ceramic would
crumble after years in steadily boiling water.
Possibly this is not a problem for your purification.
On the other hand, DuPont's Teflon (TM) chips might be mostly unchanged in
all that time.
Using brand new chips out of the jar makes sure that they have not
surface-adsorbed some substance when someone else used them.
You also might consider boiling them in 1 or 2 solvents you consider
"clean", and then drying them out, before you introduce them to your samples.
Jim Swenson
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