Glove Boxes

Use this glovebox features comparison chart to help choose the best glovebox system for your application and budget.

Inert nitrogen gas is commonly used in laboratories to control the atmosphere for highly sensitive equipment and procedures. The best way to maintain the environment in a desiccator cabinet, glove box, or similar enclosure, is to automatically purge the environment with nitrogen or argon gas. Because these processes happen automatically based on humidity set-points, smart controllers and sensors allow for more trackable, traceable, and efficient results.

Forget about renting nitrogen tanks — laboratory applications aren’t on the same level as buying helium for a kid’s birthday balloons. Critical operations can’t wait for resupply. What happens when production stops because the gas supply has depleted, or when valuable experiments or products are ruined because of moisture exposure? As far as the old-fashioned nitrogen delivery via tank and truck, why wait to have crucial laboratory supplies left on the cleanroom stoop like old milk bottles? How much time should personnel have to spend refilling each tank? And where in the space-starved facility should the bulky supplies wait for use?

Additive manufacturing (AM), commonly called 3D printing, isn’t just for rocket scientists anymore. Its use has increased exponentially as companies and researchers discover useful applications and innovative methods. Availability of equipment and supplies for performing three-dimensional printing is becoming almost commonplace; it’s just a matter of time before retailers start to offer 3D printing services, or a few mavericks begin to do it in their homes (broken coffee cup? No problem; I’ll just make another one!).

History

Back in the late 1980s, single-production industrial prototyping was going from drawing board to reality. The first patent was issued in 1986 for the stereolithography apparatus (SLA), with the

Glove boxes were first used in the 1940s as controlled environments for the military to research radioactive materials. These special controlled environments increased in popularity as the medical field began handling viruses and other pathogens for the creation of vaccines and pharmaceuticals.

These days, a number of glove box configurations are used in even more unimaginable ways that impact our lives. The following are just a few surprising glove box practices.

Studying Meteorites

Meteorite