bigdawg - 6-9-2017 at 06:09
Hi guys, so I have been reading forum posts here for years, however I just created the account about a week ago. I am a chemist (duh!) at one of the
federal agencies in my day job.
I am very passionate about citizen science and one of my major focus is developing citizen science tools for identifying contaminants of emerging
concern in drinking water, especially from private wells which dont get tested at all by US fed govt.
We developed screening level home based test based on SPE/TLC using a platform about the size of a humidifier, which has a water aspirator, vacuum
flask, TLC developing chamber, TLC spray chamber and a visualizaton chamber with UV lamps, the project page is www.analyzechemicals.com and we are going to perform its validation with a larger user base at a local university here (University of Georgia).
But, I am not here to sell you on that, heck you can perform the same test using the equipment you probably own already as I outline in a blog post
(https://experiment.com/u/sy5Inw).
I genuinely want to know if other chemistry enthusiasts here may see other potential use cases for such a system besides environmental testing, and
any modifications we can do in our design to accommodate your potential application?
I know some of you may be teachers in high school etc; do you think this is useful as a teaching aid? I keep getting intermittent inquiries from
parents using this science fairs etc but I have honestly not given a lot of thought about it so far. I appreciate any and all advice. Thanks!
Harristotle - 7-9-2017 at 01:28
Hi BD.
Very interesting. I have some students working on a related project at the moment, and they will be presenting a how-to workshop to a group of
teachers on how to do tlc in a couple of months time. I will announce more details from their findings once the current science talent quest they have
entered it into has been judged.
I look forward to more details of your system, as tlc is very useful and could really help schools do some nice science.
Cheers,
H.