Chemistry Laboratory Equipment

Depending on the nature of the chemistry work, a chemistry laboratory will probably have the most equipment of any kind of lab. This equipment will be expensive, but rarely needs to be replaced--and most chemists know how to repair their own machines, so chemistry labs usually have a high set-up cost but relatively low maintenance costs. The kinds of machinery that chemists need will depend entirely on the branch of chemistry being studied, but there are some standard items.

What to Find in a Chemistry Lab

The most iconic chemistry laboratory equipment is the glassware. Every mad scientist movie has a scene where oddly-shaped tubes and bottles take up tables of boiling and hissing chemistry. Oddly enough, most of the bizarre glassworks you see in those movies are real chemistry glasses. Ranging from standard bottles and vials to separation funnels and Erlenmeyer flasks, chemistry labs must be well stocked with every imaginable tube and jar.

Beyond the glassware, most chemistry labs need a lot more equipment. Some of this equipment is for separating one chemical from another, so that the components of a solution can be identified. These machines include rotary evaporators, hot plates, and distillation tubes--all of which use the differences in the physical properties of chemicals (such as boiling point) to separate them.

Other equipment is then used to identify the chemicals. Simpler devices such as melting point analyzers and mass spectrometers are being replaced now by more accurate methods of gleaning a chemical's identity. The most common of these is an NMR machine, which uses similar technology to an MRI machine to generate a graph of a chemical's responses to energy. Energy signatures are specific to different types of chemical bonds, and an experienced chemist can draw complicated molecular formulas from a simple NMR printout.