Chemistry Professor Greg O’Neil’s research team publishes a paper on bottle adapter invention
Last year, Chemistry Professor Greg O’Neil and his team of WWU grad students, Kaden Hekker and Adam Jones, invented a bottle adapter that makes handling hazardous chemicals safer in the lab.
The bottle adapter has an open top and fits snugly over the top of reagent bottles. There’s a distribution ring at the top of the adapter with a little tube that attaches to an argon hose. When argon flows through the ring, the inert gas floods the opening of the bottle, then acts as a barrier that protects the reagent from air and moisture. This innovative design eliminates the need for needles and the risk of puncture wounds.
The team just published a hard-earned paper on the bottle adapter in a top-tier American Chemical Society journal: New Adapters for Safe Handling of Sensitive Reagents | ACS Chemical Health & Safety.
“This is a big step toward our invention’s validation and acceptance by the community,” O’Neil said. “It’s one thing to have an idea and play with it in your own laboratory or have people that you know test it out. It’s another thing to go through a rigorous, peer-review process and have all your work scrutinized and people coming back with some really challenging questions we have to answer.”
Adam Jones stayed on as staff at Western for a year after he graduated with his master’s degree in chemistry to help further test and develop the bottle adapter. He said two major elements of the design had to change over the course of this past year.
“The first is that we realized the shape of the adapter makes a huge difference in its effectiveness. Our original design was actually pushing all of our beautiful argon up and out of the adapter’s cavity instead of down toward the reagent,” Jones said.
Washington Research Foundation funded the project and put O’Neil’s team in touch with regional expert UW Aeronautics and Astronautics Professor Dana Dabiri, who specializes in fluid dynamic simulation. Dabiri helped the team understand the angles that best distribute and keep the argon in the cavity of the adapter and how to combat high-pressure zones in the ring the argon hose is attached to.
“The argon distribution rings that we were making before was just a ring with some holes in it. We thought that that would be good enough. It turns out that it was a shockingly complex problem to solve — we really did not expect it to be as crazy as it was,” said Jones.
Since completing all the tests and research required by the peer-review process for the team’s recent publication, O’Neil distributed the updated bottle adapters to various lab groups for further testing.
“We have about a dozen different research groups in the U.S. and Japan that are currently testing these for us. We can point them to this article for additional information, then we’ll collect feedback from all of them, continue to refine our design and get the adapters out for another round of testing,” O’Neil said.
Kaden Hekker recently defended her thesis and graduated with a master’s degree in chemistry. Her thesis was based on the bottle adapter invention. Hekker said it was really gratifying to develop the bottle adapter from the ground up, beginning with proof-of-concept experiments.
She also said the team has made good progress on the patents for the invention.
“The paperwork is done. Now it’s just kind of a waiting game on another round of testing and then we’ll figure out manufacturing and the next pathways for funding the project,” she said.
Read more about O'Neil's team here.
Learn more about Western’s master’s degree in chemistry here.
Allie Spikes covers the WWU Graduate School and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies for University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at spikesa@wwu.edu.