Laboratories Laboratories
Laboratories are work rooms in which experts or trained people carry out experiments to research or use scientific processes.
This primarily refers to chemical, physical and/or biological research activities. Language or sleep laboratories are not meant.
The following pages contain regulations and information on wet lab work in these laboratories.
The main goal should be: Only protect yourself from dangers that can actually occur and not because some rule says so!
Laboratory Standards
To implement the above regulations, the Occupational Safety Department and the Biological Safety Officers have compiled basic laboratory standards as part of the Heidelberg University Building Standards Manual. These standards take into account the experience of more than 20 years of laboratory operation and planning in the laboratories of the university and the university hospital; these include, among others:
- Ventilation technology (e.g. fume hoods),
- Storage of hazardous materials (e.g. safety cabinets),
- Electrical engineering (e.g. area off)
Special fire protection systems in the laboratory
A specific safety system within the scope of these laboratory standards is, for example, automatic fire extinguishing systems for fume hoods in night laboratories and distillation rooms. In contrast to normal extinguishing systems, which in the event of a fire fill entire rooms with water (sprinkler systems) or an oxygen-displacing gas (e.g. carbon dioxide) and require larger amounts of extinguishing agent, fume hood extinguishing systems work in a small area (only in the hood) and efficiently. Powder-based fume hood extinguishing systems have been standard in the night laboratories and distillation rooms at Heidelberg University for years.
The use of plastic slat curtains (explosion and implosion protection curtains) has proven to be effective for the spatial separation of vacuum and overpressure systems in the laboratory (e.g. rotary evaporators, evaporators, protective gas distributors) to protect against flying splinters in the event of glass breakage.
Documentation activities (literature search, experimental design, electronic laboratory journal, etc.) are becoming increasingly important and time-consuming in laboratories. They should be carried out close to experiments, but should still take place in a safe place away from the direct impact of dangerous substances. Documentation zones are an efficient solution for this. Such structural separations can often no longer be implemented in existing laboratories. However, care should also be taken here to ensure that documentation places are positioned close to windows, protected from splashes and not in the immediate vicinity next to or opposite a fume hood.