The First Day

Today was an exciting day and also the first day of my Forensic Science Internship. I discovered within minutes that the research that was planned had been placed on the back-burner for a more interesting and important topic. I will be working with IR equipment. More details are to come about exactly the methodology of this experiment.
I am working with Ashley Harris at the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office. He is a Forensic Chemist and I hope to learn as much as possible from him in the month during Interim. He introduced me to the Infrared machine and unfortunatly it needs to have a part replaced so that part of the research may be delayed, but other aspects can be addressed while this problem is being attended to.
I am measuring out mixtures of certain substances and mixing them together; these substances will eventually be measured by the IR machine once it is running. I measure how much of these substances by having a pure sample of A and a pure sample of B. I then take 10 %of A and 90% of B and mix then together, and then 20% A and 80% B. And this continues untill I have at least six vials of different percentages of A and B. It is going to start with common substances like caffeine and progess into cocaine. Since pure drugs are most commonly not received in the lab, this research could help to show how the IR machine would react to these different mixtures in percentages of drugs. As noted earlier I will give many more details to how this research progresses. I am looking forward to the next month!