High Temperature Ovens And Laboratory Experiments

Working in science is a lifelong dedication. Collating a body of evidence towards proving or disproving a hypothesis can be a long and arduous task, and quite often thankless too. The conditions under which experiments have to be conducted are so stringent, that any failures in procedure or equipment can render research null and void. For this reason, it is essential that all margins for error are minimised. Human error is always a niggling threat in the back of the mind, but the threat of equipment failure can be minimised by sourcing the best products on the market, and ensuring that they are the right piece of equipment for the job.

There are countless products on the market intended for use in a laboratory, but one the main pieces of equipment that can be found within a standard lab are high temperature ovens. These ovens are often used to sterilise equipment and often found within the healthcare industry as well as used for scientific applications. The high temperature ovens have a special convection system that ensures the temperature distribution is the same throughout. The uniform temperature achieved through the high forced volume thermal convection system is quite an achievement considering some of the ovens can be as large as 32 cubic feet and can be heated up to 300 degrees Celsius.

These differ from high temperature furnaces, which are generally much smaller, but can be heated to an astonishing 1800 degrees Celsius. These furnaces are often used for sintering dental bridges and other specialist ceramics. The general purpose ovens used within the laboratory are mostly geared towards drying, curing or warming. In many cases the purpose of the oven is to provide an environment that offers a steady and maintainable temperature, not necessarily what we would consider a warm environment. When culturing certain bacteria for example, it is essential that a constant temperature is maintained that replicates the core body temperature.

When I was undertaking laboratory practice, I chose to run an experiment that detected and determined bacteria present on lettuce leaves. I used two types of lettuce that were readily available from the supermarket, the little gem and the round lettuce. I chose these two in particular because one was wrapped and therefore not susceptible to contamination from the supermarket environment, and the other was open to the elements, but not trapped in an environment that could harbour bacterial growth.

I took samples from the inner and outer leaves of the sample lettuces and placed samples in a Petri dish containing McConky's agar and then set them to incubate in a laboratory oven. The oven was calibrated to 37.5 degrees to match the human body temperature. Once the specimens had incubated for the set amount of time I inspected the results under a microscope and the results were startling. The lettuce that had been in the closed, and one would have thought, sterile environment had some very peculiar strains of bacteria present, whereas the leaves that had been left open to the elements showed very little at all.

It seems that the packaged environment was a breeding ground for bacterial growth due to lack of air flow, and although the strain of bacteria present was not hazardous, it shows that the closed environment has the potential to harbour dangerous bacterial strains. It would take many more years of study to determine if this was the case with all foods or if this was an anomaly peculiar to this particular time frame of experiment, but it was the technology behind the laboratory oven that made this possible to determine in the first place.

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