A Safety Guidance Document for Lithium Aluminum Hydride (LAH) Reduction: A Resource for Developing Specific SOPs on LAH Manipulations

Strong reducing agents like lithium aluminum hydride (LiAlH4, LAH) are frequently employed by industry and academic laboratories in syntheses and other research applications. Due to LAH’s reactivity, several laboratory explosions and fires have been documented in the literature and on various EH&S webpages at universities. Some of the accidents were caused by incorrect handling of LAH or by improper chemical processes, such as weighing on regular paper, grinding, and creating friction, using contaminated solvents and glassware, and physically scraping the material during transfers. In many of these cases, researchers did not have access to a guidance document or an SOP for many of these incidents, and no thorough risk assessment was carried out. Academic laboratories can avoid similar accidents and associated property damage by developing a safety guidance document that identifies every facet of LAH manipulation in the experiment, including reaction setup, procedures for weighing and transferring material to the reaction vessel, heating, and cooling during the reaction, quenching the reaction, and waste disposal. This LAH guidance document can be used to produce a manipulation-specific SOP that covers best practices and precautions for a variety of substrates and reaction scales.