Jay Swarup, Entry #1, Making tablets!

My first week at the Ramachandran lab at Rutgers University has been hectic, but fun! The lab is a chemical engineering lab on Busch Campus. My first day was a bit uneventful because the lab ordered materials for the experiment we will be doing. But, I got to be familiar with the place and also meet the folks that work in the lab. While I was with the group, they showed around the campus, and we decided to eat lunch in the Busch campus center. Advised by my peers, I chose to eat a great slice of pizza.

                After we went out to eat, I started to ask the graduate students what they were doing for their work. Half of the students were doing experiments and the other half was focused on modeling raw data. Because the parts were still being ordered for the experimenters, I decided to learn what the coders do. Modeling is very different than what I expected. It is mandatory that you know both MATLAB and excel because all the code is written in MATLAB and some computation is done using excel. Because an undergrad who is familiar with MATLAB is also interning in the lab, we decided to try and model a function. It was very difficult, but when we finally got a good curve, it was very satisfying. Obviously the graduate students helped us a lot, but it was still cool to see a finished product. 

                After our parts came in, though, we started doing more experimental work. Professor Ramachandran gave us a project to work on that involves making tablets and measuring the uniformity of the active pharmaceutical ingredient in the tablet. Making tablets was definitely the best part of the experiment. In order to make tablets, one must: sieve the powder, then use a granulette to vacuum a amount of powder to then drop in a tube. After this, the tube which contains the powder is then sent into an instrument with a certain force, and the tablet is extracting from the tube and ready to be used! The tablets I made are below:

  

The instrument used to make the tablets is below.

Our first step was making the tablets, which is complete. Now, we will be finding out the uniformity of the active pharmaceutical ingredient in the tablet. This will be done using the raman spectroscopy. Can’t wait to start!