Glass Bottle Safety Support - Agilent 1260 Infinity II LC Analytical HPLC System

At work we have and Agilent 1260 Infinity II high performance liquid chromatography system. You can see from the website, that the system stacks and the top level is a shelf to hold glass bottles of chemicals.  There is just a ½ " wall around the edge to keep the bottles from sliding off.  Just look at the pictures on directly from Agilent (pasted below) or at link above.  

Our safety audit determined that there were many safety risks with tipping, spilling and breaking:

• Spilling will mix chemicals for potential chemical reaction
• Tipping the containers could lead to chemicals on skin, eyes, clothing, etc. requiring washing and medical attention
• The shelf had a cushion so tipped bottles would likely not break (unless falling on another glass bottle).  However, a clumsy hand or passing employee could easily bump the system knocking the bottles to the floor leading to a chemical spill, broken glass, and potential employee lacerations.

The solution was to print a system to secure the 4 glass bottles to significantly reduce the safety issues in the design. Secondarily, the material needed to be robust to the chemicals we were using.  In our case, I preferred ASA for its chemical resistance, but it was too difficult to print such large components without a temperature controlled 3d printer chamber and I lost several pieces to splitting stress and adhesion problems after 12 to 36 hours of printing.

I settled on PETG which was still chemically robust for our chemicals and was much easier to print being at a lower temperature.

The diamond shaped holes were intentional to reduce the amount of support material I required to print the design.  (My experience says failure risk goes up the longer the print & the more dependent on support material.

I'm using a Prusa XL which allows a 300 x 300 x 300 mm volume.  Of course, this was just 350 mm in one axis, so I had to print the supporting base in 2 pieces that lock together.  They didn't have to lock, but a solid piece press fit into the top base was more secure than multiple pieces.

The base worked to decrease the chance of spilling and breaking, but not tipping (see picture below). So I built bottle supports for each hole that enclosed the bottles to a larger height.  The base of the suports are under the base and so remain extremely rigid.

I also added 8 5mm high feet to the bottom of the base to minimize contact between any spilled substance and the base.  It also allow the supports' bases to be weighted down by the entire base.

Please do your own research on the chemicals you are using and the reactivity with your choice of 3d printed material. I do not put any safety or other endorsement on this design. It is not to be used off the shelf, but a proper engineering safety analysis is performed before something like this is used.