• Question: What is your most recent experiment

    Asked by anon-274105 to Ben on 3 Dec 2020.
    • Photo: Ben Pritchard

      Ben Pritchard answered on 3 Dec 2020:

      Recently I’ve been working on trying to understand what is happening when a small ball of fuel is imploded (opposite to an explosion, i.e. going inwards) using huge lasers (from a place called NIF – national ignition facility).
      The fuel collapses quickly and very turbulently (like trying to squeeze wet soap between your hands and it flying out of the shower!) and it makes it difficult to determine certain properties like temperature and pressure inside the fuel during collapse.
      Specifically, i’ve been using a technique called X-Ray spectroscopy (x-rays like those in a hospital) and certain fuels emit certain colours of light (also known as wavelengths of light) that can be used to determine how much energy is in the core.
      Some clever mathematics and computer programming can then be used to determine the temperature and pressures inside the core.
      The reason to do this is to determine if the fuel mixture and shape was a good implosion or whether different styles of fuel pellets would be better suited for ICF (inertial confinement fusion – basically imploding stuff with huge lasers!)

Comments

  • Photo: Hugh

    Hugh commented on :

    My most recent experiment was trying to fine-tune a recipe for one of our plastics. It was something called ‘Design of Experiments’, where you change lots of things in an experiment in a very mathematically precise way. (We get a computer to do the actual maths, though.)
    I then had to run 29 experiments, checking recipe after recipe to see how changing one thing affected everything else. My colleague and I then ran the numbers through the computer, and now we know what the best recipe is to use when me make this again.
    So does anyone else at the company, so overall we’ll save a lot of time by doing this instead of everyone trying to figure it out on their own.

  • Photo: Jess

    Jess commented on :

    My most recent experiment is trying to extract the DNA from bacteriophages. The word bacteriophages translates directly to ‘bacteria eater’ and that is exactly what they do, they kill and eat bacteria. Bacteriophages are found all around us, in the soil, in the water and even in our own guts. They are naturally occurring viruses that we can use to our advantage to kill certain strains of nasty bacteria that cause infections that can’t be treated by antibiotic drugs. I have collected lots of different bacteriophages from sewage that are able to kill a strain of E. coli (a gut bacteria) that is resistant to lots of different antibiotics. I’m now trying to extract the DNA from these bacteriophages so that we can learn a bit more about them! The more we learn about them, the more likely it is that, at some point in the future, we will be able to use them to clear the antibiotic resistant E. coli from patients guts!