-
Asked by anon-177353 to Urslaan, Nicola, Helen, Daniel, Becky, Andrew on 9 Jun 2018.
-
Urslaan Chohan answered on 9 Jun 2018:
Bunsen burner! There is so much you can do with it! And not because I’m obsessed with fire… 🙂
-
-
Daniel Marsh answered on 9 Jun 2018:
I work with all sorts of analytical equipment, some very small that can be carried on a person to measure their exposure to pollution and some is huge and takes up a lot of space but one of the most useful pieces of equipment that I carry with me is actually a camera so I can keep a visual diary and this really helps me to explain what I am doing to other people all around the world.
-
Andrew Singer answered on 9 Jun 2018:
My favourite apparatus is a gas chromatograph, which I was originally trained on during my PhD. The instrument is pretty basic, like most machines you’ll find, but it has 101 ways of breaking. But since most other chemical analysis machines have 1001 ways of breaking, this is the easy one to use! It allows you to determine what chemicals are in a sample of water, soil, food, animal, etc. You can use it without knowing how it works, but it certainly helps to know the principles behind what is happening as this will help you modify the method, which is tailored to each kind of sample and chemical that you’re analysing. Put simply, you have a chemical that is concentrated in a solvent (hexane was very common). A tiny bit of the hexane is injected into a column (1 ul is common). The column looks a lot like very thin spaghetti–the inside of the column is about as wide as an algae! Very tiny! The spaghetti sits within an oven which can be used to ‘bake’ your hexane/chemical mixture. The smaller chemicals move faster than the large chemicals through the 30-meter long spaghetti. Eventually, the heat has separated the chemicals of interest within the spaghetti and they start to come out the other end (one chemical type at a time), at which point they can be detected by a detector (of which there are many). The detector counts the number of chemicals coming out at any one time. The result is a chromatogram, which is a ‘fingerprint’ of all the chemicals found in your sample. The rest of the fun is about interpreting the chromatogram, i.e., whether you know what’s in there or whether you’re trying to discover what’s in there. They write books about how to interpret the chromatograms! I love this tool as it draws on my love of chemistry and provides a very satisfying visual output of your hard work.
Comments