Writing the Experimental Approach Section

A research proposal must present an effective argument that will persuade those who read and evaluate proposals... that the research proposed is significant, that the methods of pursuing this research are well designed, and that the researcher is in fact capable of carrying out the research. 

This chapter focuses on writing the experimental section of the Project Description, the section in which you tell readers how you will conduct the proposed work. Unlike the experimental section of a journal article, which is written largely after a work has been completed, here you describe proposed methodology. Reviewers, after reading this section, should be convinced that the work is plausible and that the investigator has the background and expertise necessary to carry out the proposed work. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following  

This chapter covers what is normally presented in the second main section of the Project Description. 

As you work through the chapter, you will write the Experimental Approach section of your own proposal. The Writing on Your Own tasks throughout the chapter guide you step by step as you do the following  

We begin with excerpt 13A, part of an Experimental Approach section that you can read and analyze on your own. Excerpt 13A is a continuation of excerpt 12A, where Aga makes the case that we need to better understand the stereochemistry of metolachlor, a widely used herbicide and potential carcinogen, as it degrades in soil. In excerpt 13A, she describes two specific research objectives needed to accomplish this task. 

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Also explain the following to a chemistry colleague who has not yet given much thought to writing the Experimental Approach section of a Project Description ... 

D Writing on Your Own Complete the Experimental Approach Section... 

Below, we shall discuss the basic published results and summarise the experimental approaches that may permit the preparation of nanostructures on the chemically modified surfaces. In this section we are not going to consider the methods concerning remote actions on the surface. Among them, this can be an action with the needle of scanning tunnelling microscope, writing from different source of radiation over photo-, radiation-... 

The Effectiveness Factor Analysis in Terms of Effective Diffusivities First-Order Reactions on Spherical Pellets. Useful expressions for catalyst effectiveness factors may also be developed in terms of the concept of effective diffusivities. This approach permits one to write an expression for the mass transfer within the pellet in terms of a form of Fick s first law based on the superficial cross-sectional area of a porous medium. We thereby circumvent the necessity of developing a detailed mathematical model of the pore geometry and size distribution. This subsection is devoted to an analysis of simultaneous mass transfer and chemical reaction in porous catalyst pellets in terms of the effective diffusivity. In order to use the analysis with confidence, the effective diffusivity should be determined experimentally, since it is difficult to obtain accurate estimates of this parameter on an a priori basis. 

Obviously, there are 2n unknowns in Eq, 7,37, i.e., n moduli and n relaxation times. Therefore, at a minimum, 2n equations are needed to solve for the unknowns. For five Maxwell elements as in Fig, 7,17, ten data points would need to be selected in order to write a set of 10 equations. Further, an approach simply fitting to 10 discrete data points from an extensive master curve would not produce a smooth curve that fit the entire data set over time well. In order to obtain a mathematical expression that provides a good fit for an entire master curve from experimental data, a different approach is required. While a number of techniques can be found in the literature, one method will be briefly described in the next section. 

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