• Question: What types of tests and experiments does your field of scientific research involve?

    Asked by hollyem85 to Poonam on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Poonam Kaushik

      Poonam Kaushik answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I regularly do insect bioassay tests (checking toxicity of compounds on insects by various ways i.e. feeding them with toxic material, by coating the surface with toxic material where insect crawls etc.)), chemical constituents identification using, GC, GC-MS , HPLC, IR, LC-MS instruments and doing a bit of wet chemistry. For my formulation development experiments I do a lot of wet chemistry involving polymers, surfactants, solvents active ingredients etc.

Comments

  • Photo: Hywel

    Hywel commented on :

    For me its about either making or testing materials. I may be interested in the strength, hardness or heat resistance of a material or even the speed with which it can wear out under certain conditions.

    One really important aspect of materials is their “microstrcuture”, i..e. the way the material is made up of its components on the microscopic scale. To do this I need to use special microscopes that use electrons instead of light to let me see the structure. These are really cool pieces of kit and using them gives you a real insight into what causes a material to have the properties that it does and possibly how to change them to make it a better material.

    Equally I may need to make a new material which could include mixing the raw materials in the right proportions then pressing them together and heating them up to a really high temperature (over 2000C in some cases). Hopefully I can make materials with new and better properties in this way. But to find out I need to do the tests I mentioned above in order to measure how good the material is.