Hurst's Chemists Experiment at Uni Labs

Sixth form Chemistry students from Hurst have visited the teaching laboratories at the University of Sussex for a day of scientific matter.

26 pupils from the AS and IB classes attended the Falmer based campus where they were set to work on isomerising Dimethyl maleate and then learning new techniques in order to purify their specimen.

In the afternoon the students were able to test how successful their purification had been by determining the melting point of their sample and taking its infrared spectra.

The group also had the opportunity to visit the mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy centres, where they learnt about these techniques and heard how mass spectrometry had been involved in the ground breaking discovery of C60 molecules.