Productive! - Thursday 9-02-2017
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Jorien
09 Februari 2017 | Verenigd Koninkrijk, Londen
I started off today with an electromagnetics lecture by Dr Martin Halloway. He spoke about the function and working of capacitors and showed us how to use Gauss’ law to calculate electric fields. After the lecture I worked at the exams of doctor Tweedy a bit more and we went down to the lab to prepare the equipment for the experiment, which we would do after lunch as we wouldn’t have enough time before and would not be able to leave the experiment alone. At 12pm we had a very interesting seminar about research being carried out about the prevention of cardiac arrests. The researcher explained how they used modelling to focus their experiments. They were searching for a chemical that would ensure scar tissue to develop in the right places and ways, after coronary occlusion. They would predict which chemicals would give the best result and they would then just test these instead of all possibilities. I found the seminar very interesting as it gave a very relevant example of how bioengineering is used in medical research. After the seminar we went to the postgraduate common room to get lunch and Karla and Maryam tried to convince me to try and get into Imperial. I am not sure yet if they succeeded. When we were finished we went back to the lab and it was finally time to do the main experiment. We started off with the diffusion set up. We put the solution of rhodamine into the track-etched membrane holders and put these into beakers with pure water. After each 20 minutes we took a sample of the fluid in the beaker. These samples would later go into the fluorometer so we could determine the amount of rhodamine that had diffused through the membrane. After this set up we wanted to imitate the flux of the fluid in the eye. To do this we connected a pump to the set up. This pump would extract fluid from within the membrane holder. This would cause a flux in the direction opposite of the diffusion flow, as in the situation in the eye. The disadvantage of this set up was that we would run out of fluid considerably fast, which would make getting reliable results more difficult. Therefore we set up 2 situations with different extraction speeds. This worked out very well and we were able to get some samples from it. After we had finished these 3 experiments we put the samples in the fluorometer to get the results. By the time we had done all of this it was already 6pm, so we decided that we would interpret the results tomorrow. We returned all the equipment we had used to the right places and cleaned up the lab. After that we went home. It was already the last evening I would spend in London, so I took Jo to dinner to thank her for enabling me to stay with her and the amazing week. All in all it was a very productive and interesting day. I don’t really look forward to tomorrow as it is the day I need to leave.