Can I Mix Those Chemicals? There’s An App For That!

February 3, 2020

Improperly mixed chemicals cause a shocking number of fires, explosions, and injuries in laboratories, businesses, and homes each year.

A new open source computer program called ChemStor developed by engineers at the University of California, Riverside, can prevent these dangerous situations by telling users if it is unsafe to mix certain chemicals.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates 4,500 injuries a year are caused by the mixture of incompatible pool cleaning chemicals, half of which occur in homes. Even in laboratories and factories where workers are trained in safe storage protocols, mix-ups and accidents happen, often after chemicals are inadvertently combined in a waste container.

The UC Riverside engineers’ work is published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Their program adapts a computer science strategy to allocate resources for efficient processor use, known as graph coloring register allocation. In this system, resources are colored and organized according to a rule that states adjacent data points, or nodes, sharing an edge cannot also share a color.

“We color a graph such that no two nodes that share an edge have the same color,” said first author Jason Ott, a doctoral student in computer science who led the research.

“The idea comes from maps,” explained co-author William Grover, an assistant professor of bioengineering in the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering with a background in chemistry. “In a map of the U.S., for example, no two adjacent states share a color, which makes them easy to tell apart.”

ChemStor draws from an Environmental Protection Agency library of 9,800 chemicals, organized into reactivity groups. It then builds a chemical interaction graph based on the reactivity groups and computes the smallest number of colors that will color the graph such that no two chemicals that can interact also share the same color.

ChemStor next assigns all the chemicals of each color to a storage or waste container after confirming there is enough space. Chemicals with the same color can be stored together without a dangerous reaction, while chemicals with different colors cannot.

If two or more chemicals can be combined in the same cabinet or added to a waste container without forming possibly dangerous combinations of chemicals, ChemStor determines the configuration is safe. ChemStor also indicates if no safe storage or disposal configuration can be found.

Grover, who experienced a destructive lab fire caused by incompatible chemicals during his days as an undergraduate, said he takes the threat very seriously.

“I’m responsible for the safety of the people in my lab, and ChemStor would be like a safety net under our already strict storage protocols,” Grover said.

ChemStor’s functionality is currently limited to a command line interface only, where the user manually enters the type of chemicals and amount of storage space into a computer.

Updates are forthcoming to make ChemStor more user-friendly, including a smartphone app utilizing the camera to gather information about chemicals and storage options, as well as an integration with digital voice assistants, some of which have already begun to be developed specifically for chemists, making ChemStor a natural addition.

“Any system can communicate with ChemStor as long as the input is fashioned in a way that ChemStor expects,” Ott said. The code is available here.

https://scienceblog.com/513880/can-i-mix-those-chemicals-theres-an-app-for-that/

Technology That Destroys Pests In Wood Moves Closer To Commercialization

February 3, 2020

A technology that uses dielectric heating and radio frequency energy to destroy destructive pests lurking within wood products is closer to reaching the marketplace after a recent commercial trial at Penn State’s University Park campus.

The Dec. 17 demonstration, which was observed by regulatory and wood products industry professionals from the U.S. and Canada, validated the effectiveness and cost efficiency of the radio frequency, or RF, technology for pallet sanitation.

The treatment offers enhanced ability to terminate wood insect and nematode pests compared to conventional heat practices, noted Mark Gagnon, Harbaugh Entrepreneur and Innovation Faculty Scholar in the College of Agricultural Sciences.

“This innovation has the potential to be transformative in required international trade wood-sanitation treatment,” said Gagnon, who has been instrumental in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program since its inception, encouraging entrepreneurship across the college.

“RF treatment is more efficient and uses fewer resources than conventional kilns and chemical drying methods, and that is not only better for a company’s bottom line, but it is also better for the environment.”

Developed by Penn State scientists John Janowiak, professor of wood products engineering, processing and manufacturing, and Kelli Hoover, professor of entomology, the patent-pending, wood-treatment system heats wood in a unique configuration by using electromagnetic wave penetration, similar to that of a microwave oven.

It heats wood from the inside out, first causing the core temperature to elevate rapidly, making it an ideal method to destroy pests that have burrowed within, noted Hoover.

“Invasive pests cause about $120 billion a year in damage to our valuable forests, ecosystems and agricultural crops, and they continue to be a problem due to increased world trade,” she said, pointing to the emerald ash borer and Asian long horned beetle as examples. Both pests found their way to the U.S. in untreated pallets shipped from China in the early 2000s; the emerald ash borer alone has destroyed tens of millions of ash trees in 30 states.

Ensuring that wood used in international trade is pest-free is not just an ethical business practice, but it is a legal requirement, according to Janowiak. Wood packaging materials, including pallets, crates and chips, must be debarked, treated and inspected per international regulations. Adhering to these standards is especially crucial for the U.S. wood industry as 40 percent of its logs are processed into wooden shipping pallets.

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https://scienceblog.com/513876/technology-that-destroys-pests-in-wood-moves-closer-to-commercialization/