Autoclaving dispensible conial flask - (Aug/26/2010 )

I am planing to buy the 2L dispensable baffled BD Falcon Erlenmeyer Flasks (#355131) for bacteria medium culture. BD declared that it can be autoclaved, but plastic is plastic, I am wondering how many times it can be autoclaved before lost its shape.

Does anybody have experience on this? I chose this baffled one for better aeration, and I failed to find a glass one. If you have any suggestion on better aeration, please help me, too.

Thank you all.

Shore on Fri Aug 27 03:29:00 2010 said:

Yup, if it is polycarbonate, it can be autoclaved. No worries.

However, you have to make sure the flask is clean before you autoclave. The problem with baked in contaminants is worst than glassware. Also some chemicals attack the plastic at the autoclaving temperature. Thus to make my life easy, I autoclave my flask containing deionised water.

If you have a chemistry department, and some money to spend, you can have the glass blowing facility make you some baffled flask.

As for better aeration.. well you can
turn up the shaking incubator (increase rpm)
lower the incubation temperature (thus reduce oxygen demand) and increase incubation time,

If you have the equipment....
increase the pressure within the incubator (more dissolved O2)
increase the oxygen concentration (piped in O2, or enriched air)
forced aeration (pumping air into the media ie fish pump connected to a 0.22u filter, antifoaming agent must be used to avoid excessive bubbling).

Dear Shore,

I have doing some testing for Becton Dickinson (BD) and am up to 13 autoclace cycle runs i.e.

121oc for 20 minutes at 1 BAR pressure.

Hope this is useful


Uncle Rhombus