• Question: what was your last experiment and did it go to plan?

    Asked by anon-191306 to Kathryn, Graeme, Chris, Agnes on 6 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Agnes Wojtusiak

      Agnes Wojtusiak answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      I was trying to see how much specific laser light is absorbed into this special crystal at super super cold temperatures (just above -200 degrees Celsius! – liquid Nitrogen temperature) to see if we can use it in the future to make our lasers even more powerful! I think it went well 😀

    • Photo: Kathryn

      Kathryn answered on 7 Nov 2018: last edited 7 Nov 2018 10:29 am

      My last experiment was to find the point at which a hollow ice sphere shattered during an impact. My first test did not go to plan as the projectile went off axis during flight and therefore did not hit the target. 2 hours later we were ready to go again and this time it flew straight and hit the target. However, the projectile passed through the front side of the target and then formed a crater on the inside of the target directly opposite. First time I have seen that so not the result I wanted but a very interesting result indeed. Welcome to Experimental science. Rather than shouting “EUREKA” and running down the street most new discovers are met with confused scientists saying “Hmmmm that’s interesting, let us see if it does it again”

      Great question.

      Cheers

      Kathryn

    • Photo: Chris Davies

      Chris Davies answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      I’m afraid my experiment wasn’t quite as interesting as Agnieszka’s or Kathryn’s… We wanted to check how well our inspection systems worked through our steel manufacturing process so we heated small pieces of steel (around 10mm x 5mm) to approx. 800oC and dropped them onto the steel while it was being made at our Hot Rolling Mill which meant the steel was also at around 800-900oC. We managed to get 6 small pieces of steel on and track them through the other steel making plants until we pressed them into a “turkey tray” shape. So all in all it went pretty well!

    • Photo: Graeme Poole

      Graeme Poole answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      Haha well my last experiment was a disaster. I was trying to extract the element selenium from meteorites using acid & chemistry.

      Firstly, I knocked over the bottle and spilt half the acid (shhhh don’t tell anyone). And then reaction went wayyyy too fast and nearly exploded and I lost half the sample. Whoops.

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