Help me find a small dispenser!

January 12, 2006 11:05 AM

Where can i find a small plastic container that can hold 30 ml or more liquid and is possible to dispense exactly 1 ml of it by spray? I'm doing research on different kinds of breath sprays and need something small, portable, and capable of dispensing exactly 1ml of liquid by spray. Push comes to shove, i can settle for dispensing by dropplets. Thanx!
posted by deeman to food & drink (7 comments total)

That's going to be a tall order without a good gas handling system. How exact do you need? +/- 50%? 10%? 1%?

Liquid dispensing is much easier. Use an eppindorf pipette (aqueous). If your solvent isn't water-based then a vacuum eppindorf isn't the best solution. Let me know and I can recommend some work-arounds.
posted by bonehead at 11:37 AM on January 12, 2006

Something like an autopippeter may work. You can get different syringe sizes, there are ones in the 50mL range that can dispense 0.5, 1, 1.5, &c aliquotes. I can spray (just about exactly) 1mL of liquid across the lab and hit someone in the back of the head.

I'd imagine that you might be able to get a mist if you sqash the plastic tip.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 12:29 PM on January 12, 2006

Can you work this out from the other direction -- measure how much comes out of a spray bottle on each spray and use that as your standard unit? Maybe they vary too much, you'd have to do some testing.
posted by nevers at 2:25 PM on January 12, 2006

what im primarily looking for is ease of use. as a college student im always running around and need something portable and easy to use on the go. as for the first post, +/- 10% and under would be acceptable. it seems like it would be very hard finding something in spray form from what ive read.
posted by deeman at 2:41 PM on January 12, 2006

oh, and something on the cheap side would be a big help too.
posted by deeman at 2:41 PM on January 12, 2006

The solutions we've all been proposing are all likely out of you price range: $100 to $1000.

In your case, I'd do as nevers suggests: buy a small mister, like the ones sold for cooking oil. Using something like an analytical balance quantify what the average spray mass and standard deviation is. If you do this twenty times (though forty is better), 95% of your sprays are going to be within average +/- 2*std. dev. It's up to you to decide if (2*std. dev./average) < 10%.

If a liquid dispenser is ok, go to a drug store and buy a syringe in the first aid section. A 1 mL syringe will give you +/- 10% easily.
posted by bonehead at 3:54 PM on January 12, 2006

thanx for all the help guys. i think the best solution for the money is boneheads idea of using a syringe. it gives +/- 10% which is what im looking for and i can get it at most drug stores.
posted by deeman at 6:05 PM on January 12, 2006