With Professor Steven Abbott
At iFormulate we know that formulation challenges are rarely simple, requiring multiple pieces of science to be brought together. But formulators cannot know every key principle or be expected to do the calculations behind those principles.
So we are delighted that Professor Steven Abbott – a good friend of iFormulate – has produced for the formulation community an extensive “Formulation Scientist’s Toolkit” containing the tools, and links to his many apps that bring the tools to life. Best of all it’s a free and open-source PDF that you can simply download here. Any time you have a problem, you open it and find the tools you need, along with explanations, equations and links to the apps. At the top of this article you can view a video of Steven explaining the Toolkit.
How do you find what you want? The book is built on a matrix of Products and Sciences. You find a Product that’s relevant to your needs, and it contains links to the different Sciences you need to formulate in that space. Click on any of the Science links and you see other Products for which it’s relevant. Now you can get formulation inspiration from other domains. That’s one way to use the FST. You can also use the PDF Search function, or use the Thumbnail bar or Bookmark bar, whatever gets you to the information you need.
Some will use it to find the thing they need right now. Others will choose to get lost in the interconnections between Products and Sciences. Some will spend a lot of time exploring apps. It’s a toolkit, not a book. And it’s your toolkit so you can use it any way you like.
Having taken a look ourselves we think that you will enjoy re-discovering things you’ve forgotten you knew, and learning things you didn’t know that you didn’t know! If the science gets heavy going, Steven lightens things with stories from his own formulation life, including learning from his mistakes.
As Steven freely admits, the FST is imperfect. But it’s been designed to be easy to update. Anyone with a complaint, correction, suggestion can email him and things will be fixed. Steven has also asked our help to identify what should be priorities for new Product and Science chapters, so we welcome your views. As he said to us recently “The more the community helps the FST to grow, the more tools we have for creating better formulations, faster.”
Happy exploring, and it will be great to hear your feedback – please let us know what you think.
