Proper primer ignition

[JAM-MAN]

I’ll tell you guys a true story of adventure as it relates to sodium azide.

Although we think of it as primer chemical, it is also used as a bacteriostatic (which means something that prevents growth of bacteria). Back in the 80s, they put this stuff in some of the high grade water we use in HPLC (high pressure liquid chromatographs), which is a fancy machine to separate and purify molecules. Well, HPLC is usually run with a mixture of water and an organic solution but apparently the organic solution can make the sodium azide come out of solution and gum out the pumps.

One of the techs in our lab had this problem and so he disassembled the pump head and proceeded to scrape the stuff off – Boom! Yip, it went off! No loss of limbs but it was bad enough that he had to go get stitches….

NaN3 or sodium azide also used to be dumped in constant temp water baths for the same reason. A repair tech at the NIH lost a thumb scraping residue out of a dry water bath.