Final week!

Cant believe it went by so quickly! I spent the afternoon modifying my poster to decide at the end of the day that I still didnt like it and in fact did not like the majority of the changes I did. Therefore I restored my version from freaking 11 am yesterday and I am going to do it all over again. Hopefully I will like my poster more by the end of today. Hope yall are all doing well with yalls posters! See everyone on FRIDAY!

Good morning,

Nothing new to report. Our experiment has finished running and we managed to get the contact angles for after the experiment. We also need to get the roughness test done and look at the samples under the SEM, but my mentor didnt book a time so they were both in use last week. Hopefully we will manage to get some of that data today. In addition, the RICE people are learning how to make their whiteboard video today so that should be super exciting! Hope everyone had a great and safe July 4th.

Good morning!

On Friday we completed a site visit to the Sugarland Water Treatment plant. This is my 4th water treatment plant visit but this is the first plant that I have visited that is not a traditional plant. Here they use membranes to clean the water. They have about 65000 tubes within a single cartridge and no matter over 6 microns can enter or the tubes will become clogged. Due to this they can also not use polymers in any of the treatment as it will also clog the system. Something different they also do is that instead of using chlorine gas they use bleach; even though it is less effective and degrades more rapidly. This is because they are located right next to high school and they thought it would be nice to NOT poison the children. They recently entered the “best tasting water” competition and won runner up! They still claim they have the best tasting water in the country because the water treatment plant that won is actually located in Ontario, Canada. They are consistently checking their water quality at every step of the process and are below the national maximum  standards for coli forms, nitrates, and phosphates. They will be doubling the capacity of their plant in the next few years and are looking forward to producing 100% of their water from surface water. They are currently running ahead of schedule as they currently use 60% surface water; which is a standard they did not need to meet until 2025. While the plant manager ( who gave the tour) spoke an excessive amount of jargon it was a great field trip! If I was allowed to take field trips at my school I would definitely bring my students here.

Once again the science gods have struck against me. My mentor and I were trying the membrane distillation system to grow crystals on the membranes; BUT when I got here this morning our feed solution container was empty and all over the floor. A piece of tubing came undone and it simply pumped the solution all over the floor. After cleaning it up I put the tubing back in, made another solution and came to the office. When I went back in (about 10 minutes) the tubing had popped off again and my solution was all over the floor again. I cleaned the floor, shoved the tubing in even harder and made another solution. I then went to the restroom and came back and once again my solution was all over the floor. I figured by now my readings were useless. I went ahead cleaned the floor and shut off the machine. I went and got coffee and am trying to figure out what to do now. I ran into the RET-U that is also using the machine as he is suppose to use it today at noon. I warned him of the problem and told him that I loosed the bracket holding the tubing together shoved the tubing pieces together and tightened it but have no idea if that is going to work.  My mentor has a doctor appointment so hopefully after the lab tours today we can check if we got any crystal growth before the incidents occurred. Hope everyone else is more successful in their experiments!

And the real side of research begins. After spending last week preparing samples we finally began running a crystallization experiment on Tuesday. It takes 48 for the induction time. Today when we went in to check the data my mentor declared the experiment a failure as dissipation and frequency should be inversely proportional but were coming up as proportional for some reason. Once we went to investigate  we discovered that the machine is leaking internally!!! So  needless to say my mentor is not happy and we are now spending the afternoon discussing with the tech at Qsense how to correct the problem. YAY science!

Good morning!,

This week has been filled with learning new equipment! I have learned how to use a sonication machine, UV ozone chamber, a vacuum machine for plating metals, and a drop shape analyzer. I have also began formulating my lesson plan and writing my abstract. The abstract is particularly difficult to write since it is usually the last thing that you write; it comes off as more of an introduction than an actual abstract. We are also learning tinkercad for developing 3D images for publications and posters. I am hoping to learn it for 3D printing to incorporate it into my lesson plan. Here are some photos of the equipment I learned:

Sonication machine

Drop shape analyzer

Vacuum Machine

UV ozone chamber