Entry 004: Summary of Week 3 holiday work

During last Friday, 15/06/2012, my group mates had a meeting with our supervisor in the morning at 10 a.m. According to last week's agreement on having the opportunity to visit one of the chemical labs of Singapore Polytechnic to have a clear look at how our school's chemicals are being labelled and stored, however one of the TSOs was on leave and we did not manage to get a good look on how the current chemical inventory is being used and stored.

After visiting the lab, we manage to absorb more infomation on how the Globally Harmonized System(GHS) works, with important factors that has to be put up on the stored containers such as product names, pictograms, signal word as well as hazards statement.

Currently, our school's chemical laboratory requires GHS labellings standards even for smaller containers that is being transferred out from a large storage. With this in mind, our supervisor offered us to attend a talk presented by one of our vendors, Chemwatch later in the day time.

This vendor, Chemwatch, as of our knowledge after the talk is able to provide services that caters to our needs such as GHS standards in terms of labelling as well as theirs Material Safety Data Sheets(MSDS). However, the school policy requires staffs/lecturers to purchase chemicals from vendors that are able to provide MSDS and to use the provided MSDS to be imprinted onto the labels. This would mean that the school has to use the MSDS provided by chemwatch but not the vendor that sells chemical itself.

The above is a summary on what happened during the Friday, 15/06/2012.
It will be continued....

Entry 003: End of MST...Back to FYP

So last Tuesday we resumed our FYP meeting with our supervisor after a week long of MST. First of all, we were told to complete a questionnaire from MindWave, our vendor, in order to receive a sample database from them.

After which, we started our meeting. Basically, we went through "what is controlled chemicals". They are classified into 4 categories; hazardous substance, petroleum & flammable, poison lists and explosive. These 4 categories are controlled by different authorities.

NEA (National Environment Agency) - Hazardous
SPF (Singapore Police Force) - Explosive
HSA (Health Sciences Authority) - Poison lists
SCDF (Singapore Civil Defence Force) - Petroleum & Flammable

Our supervisor showed us the website of different authorities that set up the regulations so that we have a better understanding about controlled chemicals. The school have to apply a license from different authorities in order to handle and store controlled chemicals. Apart from that, we also learnt that there are 4 different chemical inventory forms used in SP and an additional form for waste disposal. The TSOs have to ensure that the forms are kept up-to-date.

We discussed about our Gantt Chart making. If possible, we will try to finish it by the end of June.

We also discussed about our upcoming meeting, which is next Friday. we will be having a lab visit where we explore the facility and try to generate some ideas on how to improve the current chemical inventory database. We will try to use softwares like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access for our database and make a comparison between the two softwares to find out which is the most appropriate for our FYP.

That's all for now.

By Nuruddin

Entry 002: Week 8

For the past two week, our group had been occupied with revision for MST as well as the MST week itself too. Now that it's over, we are having our MST break where we will begin doing our FYP in earnest. We are meeting our supervisor, Ms Lee on Tue 5th June, to follow up on the next step to be done for our FYP. 

Some of things that we would like to achieve within these 3 weeks break:

- Conduct preliminary literature research

- Decide on a lab to be use and tour through it under supervisor's supervision.

- Retrieve a copy of database from vendor and analyse the elements within for evaluation at later stage.

- Brainstorm and come out with possible questionnaire for targeted TSO, to aid better understanding on the use of current method used on campus for chemical inventory and the drawbacks encountered.

That's all for now. Will update after upcoming FYP meeting.

By Swee JieBin