Not to be confused with Reddit/r/ProLifeTips, this page is a list of some things I learned or developed while employed as an analytical chemist. I doubt any of this has been published elsewhere, but I can't be sure of that.
Many years ago I was new at my then-current job and was sent to a pilot plant for a process start-up. I was the youngest, newest of the three-man team sent there, and I was there only to provide analytical support to the plant's analytical lab. (Longer story there, but that's off-topic.)
The process involved a chlorination with chlorine gas, and the three of us were given a tour by one of the plant chemists. There we were shown the chlorine gas cylinder sitting on a floor-platform-balance and connected to the process piping by a simple loop of 3/8" metal tubing. I (silently) wondered how they were going to take weight readings of the chlorine without constantly disconnecting and reconnecting that tubing, but I just figured that they must have a procedure and knew what they were doing.
I was wrong. They over-chlorinated the batch because the readings on the balance weren't reflecting the true amount of chlorine being introduced to the process. They didn't discover this till afterwards. Fortunately for the process, the excess chlorine had no deleterious effect on the product formation.
What we only learned months later, after a much delayed experiment related to process hazards evaluation, was that the process solvent, DMF, might cause a thermal runaway and possible explosion.*
In principal, then, they might have blown up the reactor vessel, or worse, by over-chlorinating the batch, and it all would have been due to their imperfect procedure for estimating the chlorine charge -- which a question from me might have prevented. Our luck held and there were no such consequences, but I shudder to think what might have been.
* (Note: Don't quote me on that. That's what I was told was determined from experiments done at our home facility. I did not review the data myself and I do not know whether this information was ever published. If this information would be of importance to anyone, please PM me and I'll see if I can locate the chemist who did this work and put you into contact with him. However, I did find this reference, if relevant: "After a thermal runaway reaction during chlorination in DMF solution, investigation revealed that saturated solutions of chlorine in DMF are hazardous, and will self-heat and erupt under either adiabatic or non-adiabatic conditions." Bretherick, L. Handbook of Reactive Chemical Hazards. 4th ed. Boston, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd., 1990, p. 99 )
We had trouble from time to time in our lab with static electricity. Static can affect dry powders and make them hard to control -- "refusing" to be transferred between containers or, worse, "spraying" all over the place when removed from their container. Static can directly affect a lab balance, making it virtually impossible to get a correct reading. I believe that most of this effect is actually due to static charge on the balance directly attracting or repelling a statically charged sample container, but I am by no means sure of that.
Controlling the humidity in the lab is the first line of defense. You really should do that anyway. The way to get your company to spring for humidity control is to read the specs on the expensive apparatus in the same lab space. I'm sure an HPLC must run at least $50k these days, and some of the older equipment we had, IIRC, has a fairly tight humidity spec -- non-condensing on the upper end, and maybe 50% RH on the lower -- but don't quote me on that. (Modern equipment may only specify "non-condensing," but I suggest contacting the equipment manufacturer's engineering staff and discussing with them the effect of very dry ambient air on their equipment. I think you'll find they don't like that!) This strategy is exactly the same as used for air conditioning (old mainframe) computer rooms -- prove to management that lack of a simple HVAC control like temperature or humidity could wipe out their investment in equipment, and suddenly they take the problem seriously. (People's comfort they don't care about.)
Assuming the humidity is reasonable, the next step is to minimize generation of static. If your normal lab clothes are synthetic, switch to cotton (not wool). Cotton lab coats. Avoid rubber-soled shoes if possible.
Especially If the floors adjacent to the lab space are carpeted, provide safe means for dissipating static on the body as well. A wrist grounding strap could be used, but it probably would suffice to put a metal plate at the edge of the balance table (where users would touch it) and run a 24-ga wire from that plate through a 100 kiloOhm resistor to ground.
After this try static dissipation means. Zero-Stat anti-static "guns" work ONLY if used properly. Read up on them before attempting to use them. They are roughly equivalent in operation to magnetic-tape-head demagnetizers, which can magnetize or demagnetize an object. Used incorrectly these devices will not eliminate static at all. As I recall, you have to squeeze the trigger slowly and release it slowly. If it clicks, that means a spark has jumped internal to the device, shorting out the electrostatic field and rendering the attempt futile. Emphasize this point: A click means the attempt did not work. Try again.
Another approach is to actively generate ions in the vicinity of your operations. I don't know if they're still available, but there used to be little beta-particle-emitting strips available through supply houses. They had limited lifetimes and had to be recycled through the supplier, a downside. However, while the radioactive source was active, they did work.
The modern alternative to beta-emitters seems to be ion generators. I have little experience with these so merely point out to you their availability.
Bottom line: Humidity works best. I used to exhale in the general direction of my work to locally increase humidity and found it at least as good a technique as any other I'd tried.