Kugelrohr is German for “sphere tube,” and it’s used in chemistry for vacuum distillation, often necessary for chemical synthesis.
Professors Dominey and Goldman research lab designed the portion of a kugelrohr that would allow isolating the chemical compounds that their group synthesize. There is a glassware manifold that connects to a spherical flask in which one hopes to condense the vapors of the synthesized compound. To accomplish this, the flask is inserted into a kugelrohr that holds dry ice (at -109 ºF) which also helps insulate that environment from the laboratory.
The original design was created in OpenSCAD. Its advantages are that the multiple parts could be designed programmatically and parametrically such that one could adjust those values to iterate the design without having to try visually modifying it. The resulting design can then be printed directly or imported into a tool such as SketchUp to finesse the design.
Information Services was able to help the group 3D print a few to aid in their research, and they now have three of them.
