While lab accidents that involved personal injuries or significant property damage are required to be reported by law, many minor lab incidents or near misses are less frequently reported, especially in an academic research environment. However, public awareness of these stories and incidents create valuable learning opportunities and can prevent similar mishaps from happening in the future. Inspired by a near miss reporting system from the Dow Chemical Company, the University of Minnesota Joint Safety Team, a student-led safety initiative between the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, developed the Learning Experience Reports (LERs) system as a platform to selfreport and share safety stories occurring within the two departments. LERs are short, anonymous, voluntary submissions by researchers who were either directly involved with or witnessed a safetyrelated incident, near miss, or observation of unsafe practices. In this report, we compiled and analyzed 85 LERs submitted by researchers from Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering & Materials Science at the University of Minnesota during 2014−2019. Most notable from our results was that the top three most frequently occurring hazards were spill, fire, and equipment failures. LERs encourage open discussions of lab incidents and near misses through honest, compelling stories among academic researchers and educate researchers to follow better lab practices. For university administrators, LERs complement existing hazard assessment and incident reporting methods and allow a better understanding of the current research safety landscape among the student body. For researchers, the LER system allows them to develop safety awareness at an early stage and benefit their future careers. Hence, we strongly recommend academic research institutions to adopt a similar LER system to improve the safety culture in academia. Here, we outline the logistics required to implement an effective LER distribution system as well as provide the cumulative data in order to ease the setup of a system for others.
Ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) is an oxygen barrier polymer used to prevent premature degradation of food, pharmaceuticals, and other products due to its semicrystallinity, strong intermolecular interactions, and consequently low free volume. EVOH is made using traditional free-radical copolymerization, which leads to little structural regularity. We utilized ringopening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) to determine how regioregularity impacts the barrier properties of EVOH-related materials. A regioregular (head-to-tail) polymer was synthesized from ROMP of 3-acetoxycyclooctene, followed by hydrogenation and deacylation to give a linear, highly regioregular EVOH (PH3OHCOE) containing the equivalent of 75 mol % ethylene units. The same process was carried out with 5-acetoxycyclooctene, but the resulting polymer (PH5OHCOE) is regiorandom. Both polymers were compared to an industry benchmark, EVOH-44, containing 44 mol % ethylene units. After processing, differential scanning calorimetry showed that the semicrystalline PH3OHCOE had a higher melting temperature and enthalpy of melting compared to semicrystalline PH5OHCOE, indicating that PH3OHCOE is more crystalline. This was confirmed by wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS). WAXS, rheological studies, and polarized optical microscopy showed that PH3OHCOE has a more well-defined crystal structure, a higher degree of hydrogen-bonding between −OH groups, and a higher glass transition temperature compared to PH5OHCOE. These differences were also highlighted in their tensile behavior, where PH3OHCOE and EVOH-44 exhibited brittle failure compared to the ductile behavior observed for PH5OHCOE. Oxygen barrier testing demonstrated that regioregular PH3OHCOE had an oxygen permeability more than a factor of 3 lower than regiorandom PH5OHCOE but still higher than EVOH-44, while water barrier testing showed that PH3OHCOE had the lowest water permeability, more than 6 times lower than EVOH-44. These results highlight the importance of regioregularity on the barrier properties of EVOH-like materials and show that structural regularity can lower oxygen permeability while maintaining low water permeability at the low vinyl alcohol content.
Processable epoxy-telechelic polyalkenamers and polyolefins were synthesized using ring-opening metathesis polymerization and photochemically cured to furnish the corresponding crosslinked elastomers.
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