St Edmund’s Canterbury – Spectroscopy workshop at the University of Kent

11 Jul 2019

Lower Sixth Chemists visited the Chemistry department at the University of Kent on Thursday 27th June to take part in a spectroscopy workshop. Spectroscopy techniques are a very important tool for chemists to be able to ascertain the identity of substances and their purity. Our students took to the workshop samples of aspirin that they synthesised in the school labs and were pleased to find out that they had indeed made some aspirin and that the samples were around 98% pure.

The visit was very valuable in bringing to life a difficult part of the A-level Chemistry curriculum and gave students the opportunity to work with very sophisticated scientific equipment that is not available in schools. Our thanks go to Dr David Colclough at the University of Kent for this help and for sharing his knowledge with our students.

Dr Eva Fernandez, Head of Chemistry