I am PhD student in Chemical engineering. I have been on it for 20months now. I am however afraid that I am not making enough progress. I was working on an industrial project with the aim of delivering a prototype for the first year in my project. After 1year i realised this was not going to earn me a PhD as i was basically follow orders. Still this gave me very useful experience and because of the industrial nature of it all it was fast paced and results were obtained. Now i have been asked to just create my own PhD from the project which I have struggled to do a bit. The experiments dont seem to be working very well. Also the areas I am looking to work on seems to have been covered before but supervisor feels since new materials are been used and different technique then its Novel despite similar results been obtained. Just need come perspective if what i am going through is normal or am in real trouble. It should be noted that I passed my transfer Viva so its not been all negative

Hi

Although I'm in a completely different field (my PhD is in artificial intelligence and automated image analysis) I feel that I can somewhat relate to what you're going through. My project was initially to develop new edge detection algorithms but throughout the course of my research I have mostly been applying existing algorithms to situations they haven't been used in before.

I have had similar worries about whether my work is novel enough to constitute a full PhD but I found that the best thing was to speak to my supervisors, and other experts in the field, about it. They have a much better level of understanding of the whole field of study in general, so I tend to trust their feelings over mine when they say they think it's enough.

As PhD research students I think we are often too critical of our own level of contribution. The papers we read most often are the ones that turned out to be ground-breaking or had a huge impact on our field. Personally I often compare what I have done to these, and in my head I come up way too short. We have to remember that even a small contribution can be enough, and it can even pave the way for future researchers.

As I said though, I'd trust your supervisor. If they think your contribution is worthwhile then it probably is. I wouldn't worry too much about failed experiments either. As my supervisor always tells me when I have similar worries, your failed experiments can often mean that other researchers know what to avoid when they're carrying out similar research in future. That can often be just as valuable as positive results.