• Question: Has anything gone wrong during your investigation?

    Asked by Callie to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 16 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by BeckyJadeR, OLIIII.
    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      At this point I am waiting for the time where things actually go according to plan.

      When doing an investigation you have a plan of what should happen and that is rarely the outcome of the experiment. In some instances the outcome might be so different that you might not have been prepared for it. The worse that happened to me was that my reaction mixture caught fire with the fire being transferred to my labcoat.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      I was running a reaction that was meant to be at 240°C but one of the thermocouples that reads temperature failed and so the heater didn’t think it was heating any more and turned the power up and up and up until 5 mins later (yes, it all happened in the space of 5 mins!) it had reached 520°C! If I hadn’t noticed it when I did, it may have melted the aluminium heating block which would have been horrendous!!! I have made lots of adjustments now though so it won’t happen again!!

    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Oh absolutely, one of the joys of working with lasers is they quite often burn things, including the optics and mirrors you pass the laser beam through. One of our Nd:YAG lasers managed to burn the YAG rod inside (which is a small bit of crystal that you make the laser light in) which was £6000 repair job and the company actually has to grow these crystals to order. Whoops!

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Yes, I had a small issue with my spectrometer – we had a power spike, which knocked out the bulb in the spectrometer (£800 – it’s not a normal bulb!). So we replaced that, and then found the power supply was gone (£2000). We replaced this, we found the amplifier had died too (£5000)… In total 5 things had been knocked out by the power surge, and it took us about 3 months to get it back up and running…

    • Photo: Francesca Palombo

      Francesca Palombo answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      All the time, so you need to able to readjust the procedure and make it right.

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