Can you please elaborate why gloves are bad ?
I've never handled liquid nitrogen, but everytime I've seen someone handle it they wore gloves like these:
I've never handled liquid nitrogen, but everytime I've seen someone handle it they wore gloves like these:
Gloves are not a perfect insulator, therefore they absorb heat and cold. It takes time for the cold to permeate the gloves - i.e. you observe significant temperature gradient over thickness of the glove. By the time your hand feels the cold, the whole width of the glove is bloody cold. In order to remove the cold from the glove you need to heat it. The only heat source is your hand inside of the glove, therefore the heat is taken from your hand. You need as much heat from your hand as much cold you have taken from LN to bring the gloves to 0. Unless you remove the gloves when the cold starts to permeate - hello frostbite.
While Leidenfrost effect allows one to splash LN on their hands without any or at least significant damage, gloves simply allow more splashes, not full immersion. Handling LN with gloves is a delaying technique, gloves do not magically protect from cold.
If the gloves slow down the process enough so that when you feel cold you have time to put down the container and remove the gloves (less than five seconds?). I mean, to me I'd imagine that is the sole purpose to wear them in the first place?
It would, I imagine, also help from panic. If you notice that you got LN on your gloves there is less panic than getting it on your skin - less chance of a reflex reaction that just makes things worse.
For example if you are arc welding and some nasty blob of molten metal drops on your hand, gloves will provide "heat through" time cushion to remove the gloves more or less safely (easily removable layer also helps avoid hot/cold blob sticking to your body), but keeping the gloves on will most likely still result in a burn. There is a hidden danger with cold that cold does not radiate like heat and we have much less intuitive understanding of how cold affects the skin. Sometimes people get frostbitten during winter activities without them noticing that something was too cold for too long.
The problem is most gloves are designed for vastly warmer temperatures and you don't notice frostbite if your hand cools down slowly.
I don't think so. The only way you could make an object like a glove for continuous LN2 exposure, and not have it be 2 feet thick, is multilayer vacuum insulation (like LN2 dewars use). But that would not let you move your hands or fingers at all.
Though I suspect mittens are probably far easier to manufacture as that's what current designs for -60c use. Either way you are not going to have much flexibility, but could grab something.
Maythe the LN would "stick" to the gloves, freeze them, and then freeze the skin?