Pre heat up and cooling on autoclave - (Feb/20/2015 )

Hi BioForum people.

I have a question about an autoclave issue I just encountered. The protocol I have states that my pre heat (before sterilization) and cooling has to have a certain amount of time, but when I was looking at my autoclave print out I could see that the time for  both the pre heat and cooling was 2 minutes quicker than the protocol said. That made me realize that I dont really understand that requirement in my protocol, could anyone explain to me what kind of reasoning this could have? And if I need to repeat my experiment? The only thing I can really thing of is that I dont want a to quick heat up because their could be some sort of over boiling of the liquid, but otherwise I am not sure. Hope there are some people out there with more autoclave knowledge than me

Best regards,

Jonas

Don't worry, the critical thing with an autoclave is the sterilization pressure and time, which depend on the application. Usually liquids are done for 20 min at 121 psi (old units, but then my autoclave is old...)

Fast cooling might cause some bubble over, but this is usually related to the pressure relative to the temperature.