Care and cleaning of NMR tubes

Every NMR user ends up with a collection of used NMR tubes. These tubes are often cleaned and used over and over, however, some care needs to be taken when cleaning tubes to prevent them from being damaged. Damaged tubes give poorer quality spectra, and may even break the spectrometer probe. This post provides some guidelines on best practices for cleaning NMR tubes.

NMR tube specifications

NMR sample tubes come in a variety of grades. Good quality tubes will not only give you better quality spectra, but are less likely to damage the instrument. In this post the specifications used to distinguish a good NMR tube from a bad one are explained and how these parameters affect your spectra are discussed.