Adventures in Analytical Chemistry: True Stories of a Chemical Detective

by Barbara Belmont

Originally published in SCALACS Magazine. All rights reserved.

For nearly 40 years, I worked as an analytical chemist for a small independent laboratory that specialized in chemical problem solving. That is, I was a chemistry detective retained to find out the cause of product failure, the identity of anomalous substances, or the solution to a confounding chemical problem.  I think you will find some of my projects very interesting. 

The malodorous ooze

Originally published in the October 2025 issue of SCALACS Magazine

My first story is about a smelly sticky substance oozing up between granite pavers at a commercial restaurant/retail development in Downtown Los Angeles. Some celebrity chefs were set to open up a new restaurant at the development, but the stink in the air had the chefs threatening to pull out of the deal. My client was the attorney for the developer, and my assignment was to identify the ooze and the smell, as well as a colorless translucent film located on some of the granite slabs. Through my client’s legal discovery process, I learned that at some point in time the granite pavers had become loose from their concrete setting bed, and a consultant had recommended injecting epoxy under the pavers to glue them into place. I got samples of the epoxy system from a contractor’s supply store, and used infrared spectrophotometry to compare this exemplar product with the substances from the site. I discovered that the colorless translucent film from some of the granite slabs was actually properly cured epoxy, matching the exemplar perfectly. I figured out that the sticky smelly ooze was actually mis-proportioned epoxy, containing almost twice as much of the epoxy part B than expected. Part B of the epoxy system also had a peculiar smell. Headspace GC-MS showed that the ooze and the exemplar Part B emitted the same substances. Therefore the odor that people were complaining about was the odor of excess Part B of the epoxy system. I persuaded my client to interview the epoxy installation team, who admitted that there had been a day that the epoxy pumps weren’t working correctly, so they had swapped Part A and Part B connections. The result was a mis-proportioned mixture that never hardened and had no cohesive integrity. There is more to the story that was beyond the scope of the original request, and ultimately I was to appear as expert witness in a civil trial. A half hour before I was to appear, the plaintiff accepted a $1M settlement offer from the construction company. This was 1998, so $1M was considered a very large settlement. Besides paying the expert’s and attorney’s bills, the money was used to demolish the defective granite plaza and rebuild a new one. The celebrity chefs moved in and their food was delicious. 

The fatal tent warming

Originally published in the November/December 2025 issue of SCALACS Magazine.

A father and son went camping. It was a cold night, so when it was time to go to sleep the father carried their portable barbeque with smoldering charcoal into the tent to keep warm. The carbon monoxide emitted from the incomplete combustion of the charcoal accumulated in the tent during the night. The father did not wake up the next morning, but the son survived. EVERYBODY knows not to take a smoldering stack of charcoal indoors, right? Apparently, the father did not know, and neither did his family and friends, nor his extended family. They all pitched in and hired an attorney to pursue a wrongful death lawsuit against the tent maker, claiming that the tent must have been defective. They claimed that the tent maker had made the tent weave too tight out of negligence, then covered up their negligence by replacing that tent model with a more permeable model the following year. We got the original tent as well as the new model. Doing our best to replicate charcoal burning conditions for each experiment, we measured the carbon monoxide content in each tent over a two-hour period using Draeger color indicator tubes. In this test, a controlled volume of air is drawn through the tube using a special bellows pump. After drawing the air through the tube, the length or intensity of the color indicator in the tube is proportional to the concentration of the analyte in the air. We learned that the carbon monoxide level in the original tent reached LC50 concentration within 10 minutes of starting the test sequence. (LC50 is the concentration of carbon monoxide in the air that will kill 50% of the test population). The carbon monoxide level in the new model tent never reached the lethal level, but it did reach brain-damage level. We also had a textiles testing lab subject each tent fabric to air permeability testing, the results of which supported the plaintiff’s claim about the fabrics from the two models having different permeability. Even though we were able to prove our client’s claim about the tent fabric permeability, the attorney could not prove manufacturing negligence to the jury in a civil court trial. The jury, like me, just rolled their eyes and said “EVERYBODY knows not to take burning coals into a tent”, and sided with the defendant.  

What's that VOC?

Originally published in the January/February 2026 issue of SCALACS Magazine.

A little background: Our local geography and weather conditions trap aerosolized particulate pollution and also create photochemical smog. To address the issue, the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) was created. SCAQMD regulates the amount and composition of volatile organic compounds (VOC) that are allowed to be in all sorts of coatings and adhesives, including architectural coatings. By limiting the amount of VOC in these products, SCAQMD has significantly helped reduce photochemical air pollution in the area. VOC can be determined indirectly or directly. The indirect method is simple and cheap. It involves testing for total volatile matter through a simple evaporation test, testing for total water by Karl Fischer titration, then finding the difference between the two to calculate VOC. That is, whatever is volatile that is not water is considered to be VOC. The direct method uses GC-MS. And while it is a more specific method, it is more difficult to use because it requires discovery of the identity of all organic volatile matter before it can be assayed. Since every product is different, extensive quality assurance testing is required to prove that a direct assay is actually working properly. All that background is needed to explain one of my more memorable VOC testing adventures. A paint product came to me labeled “zero VOC”. Using the indirect method, I found 2.5% VOC. The client insisted their VOC content was “zero”, and engaged me to figure out why it wasn’t “zero”. During the composition discovery part of the analysis, I found some N-butyl diethanolamine, tetramethyl decynediol, and tetrathylene glycol with a total roughly estimated concentration near 2.5%. In talking with the client about my discovered volatile substances, they said “but those aren’t VOCs… are they?”. “Well”, I responded, “they are organic, they evaporate under the test conditions, and they are not exempt, so they must be VOCs.” They had made an incorrect assumption about the volatility of those ingredients in their paint. After some thought, the client decided it would be better to re-label the product to “ultra low VOC”, than to reformulate. I was very relieved to terminate the project, because I was in no way prepared to rigorously quantify those compounds! 

The blushing dashboard

Originally published in the March 2026 issue of SCALACS Magazine.

An OEM manufacturer of vehicle dashboards had a problem. Their molded plastic products had an unknown substance on the surface. This company practiced Total Quality Management, and had zero tolerance for defective parts. Their goal was to identify the source of any quality problem, and institute measures into their standard operating procedures to prevent the problem from happening again. My customer presented to me several dashboards removed from new vehicles. Close up they looked like they had patches of a waxy white solid on their surface. I isolated the waxy material and used FTIR to identify it as butyl stearate. I compared this identity with the dashboard ingredients provided by the customer. None of the product ingredients matched. After digging a little, I learned that butyl stearate is a common injectionmold release agent, but the customer swore that this was not a substance they used in the manufacturing. I asked the customer to dig a little deeper and talk to the people operating the molds. Sure enough, some old-timer had been using their handy secret spray can of butyl stearate on the molds. Problem solved, SOP’s put into place, and old-timer re-educated. About a year later, the same customer returned with another similar-looking problem from a different vehicle. This time, FTIR revealed that the substance was one of the light stabilizers used in the product. I had to dig deeper on this one, because there was not a good reason for the light stabilizer to be migrating to the product surface. I used GC-FID to assay the light stabilizer concentration in the plastic. I learned that the concentration was ten times higher than the formula stated. A close look at the manufacturing batch records revealed that someone had made a factor of ten error in compounding the product. Essentially, the plastic dashboard had more light stabilizer in it than the plastic could hold, hence, the light stabilizer migrated out to the surface. The customer revised their standard operating procedures to make sure this error would never happen again. I identified the quality issues for the product lines, educated the customer about how to prevent the issues from occurring again, and did such a good job at it that I never heard from them again. But they did send some of their suppliers my way for subsequent quality investigations. 

The ironclad rhodium swindle

Originally published in the April 2026 issue of SCALACS Magazine.

Here is a bizarre story about some mining speculators. A client sent in a yellow powder to determine whether it contained rhodium.  We used X-Ray Fluorescence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_fluorescence) to determine that the powder contained a lot of iron and chlorine. Its color and the fact that it was very corrosive suggested it was iron (III) chloride. The client came by taxi to the office to get the report, and paid with cash hidden deep within her cleavage. Just as she was finishing up with the transaction, some men showed up at our lab to meet with her.  She says to them “Once again, gentlemen, no rhodium was found. If you want me to invest in your project, you need to prove that your mine has rhodium in it.” A few weeks later, the same men showed up unannounced. They were each wearing baseball caps with an embroidered rhodium element symbol. They said “Well that was a little embarrassing last month, but we believe we have our process refined now.” They handed over a small protective hard-shell case containing a very shiny ingot of metal. They were sure it was rhodium because, well, because it was very hard, heavy, and shiny.  And because their “chemist” said so. By now I didn’t really trust these people. I was concerned that they could be scammers who would break into the lab and steal the ingot, then make an insurance claim for stolen rhodium. But mercenary analytical chemists have to pay the rent, so we accepted the project with payment up front. X-Ray Fluorescence showed only iron was present in this metal. When I saw that result, I tossed a magnet in the general vicinity of the ingot, and was unsurprised to see the magnet veer off its course to latch to the ingot surface. I measured the ingot dimensions and weighed it, calculating its density to be about 7.9 g/cm3 (same as iron). Rhodium density would be 12.4 g/cm3. The customers were stunned, and after much back and forth with non-disclosure agreements we agreed to review their “process” to see if we could explain to them what had gone wrong. They never paid the retainer fee to initiate our consulting services, so I did not get further involved. 

Barbara Belmont has a Professional Science Master’s in Analytical Chemistry from Illinois Institute of Technology, is an ACS Fellow, and serves the Southern California local ACS section as Secretary/ Treasurer. Barbara closed the lab in 2021 so she could finish out her productive years enjoying her first career goal of teaching college chemistry. She is a full-time Lecturer at CSU Dominguez Hills, teaching Quantitative Analysis, a type of Analytical Chemistry. 

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