Improperly mixed chemicals cause a shocking number of fires, explosions, and injuries in laboratories, businesses, and homes each year.
A new open source computer program called ChemStor developed by engineers at the University of California, Riverside, can prevent these dangerous situations by telling users if it is unsafe to mix certain chemicals.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates 4,500 injuries a year are caused by the mixture of incompatible pool cleaning chemicals, half of which occur in homes. Even in laboratories and factories where workers are trained in safe storage protocols, mix-ups and accidents happen, often after chemicals are inadvertently combined in a waste container.
The UC Riverside engineers’ work is published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Their program adapts a computer science strategy to allocate resources for efficient processor use, known as graph coloring register allocation. In this system, resources are colored and organized according to a rule that states adjacent data points, or nodes, sharing an edge cannot also share a color.
Read more at University of California - Riverside
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