I can’t believe that this the end of a great program…I had a blast! I people and experiences made available in this program are the best!  I have bonded with my lab team so much that I am headed to Dumpling Party with them after this.  I also loved making the video and the poster…they helped me to see the overall picture and see how everything connects and wraps together.  Can’t wait to share and explain to everyone else at the symposium!

We are trying a new method to get TiO2 to fluoresce.  We are using Alizarin Red S to connect with TiO2 by suspending them together 24 hours.  If the connections are “just right,” it will lower the “band gap” which means the gap in energy it takes for the electrons to jump from one level to another.  The lower the band gap, the easier it will be for a low frequency light source like visible light to be able to cause fluorescence (electrons to jump a level and then fall back down).  For preliminary data we are using a basic 1:1 molar ratio and 1:2 molar ratio of TiO2 to Alizarin Red S to just see if there is any difference in the amount of fluorescence (if any).  The last time we tried to coat the TiO2 particles with DMSA (Dimercaptosuccinic Acid) to see if this chelator would help it fluoresce, the reflection at 90 degrees was almost the same wavelength as the original source (but usually fluorescence is a significantly lower wavelength), indicating it might be just diffraction and not really fluorescence.  I believe we are checking the fluorescence results later today.

The El Paso desalination plant is the largest inland plant in the world and uses reverse osmosis to pressurize water to pass through several layers of fine membrane formed by wrapping hundreds of feet around a small inner tube.  There is a lot of energy spent in creating the high pressure system, hence the need for improvements using nanotechnology.  They have 5 pumps currently being used, each with its own section of pressurized membrane bound pipes and the capacity to expand to a 6th pump.   Because the membranes function somewhat slower after several weeks of use, 1 or 2 sections of membranes are offline at a time to remove the biofilm by flushing with water for a week.  Thus, there are always between 1 to 3 of the pumps offline at a time, depending on water usage.  The salt concentrate formed during filtration is collected and piped 22 miles northwest to White Sands where it is gravity feed down into an underground slate bed there, perfect to absorb the salt.  The  El Paso desalination plant can produce up to 27.5 million gallons of of clean permeate water daily.

I am looking ahead to the abstract/poster, because I want to know what happens if our research never gets the question answered.  What if we find a lot about what does not work, and not a lot about what does answer the question?  I mean, I know that trouble-shooting problems in research is part of good science, but is that ok to talk about on our poster?  It is possible (not ideal) that we might spend the whole 6 weeks and not advance as much as we hoped, and not have an answer for our original question.  I just wanted to make sure that it is ok to make our poster highlight the “work in progress” toward a question and not have to be a fully answered question.  And, therefore, since our abstract is due ahead before we know if we have any results, it may be “misleading” to what we eventually find, but we will make it match as best we can.  Does this sound right?

All is well in Dr. Gardea’s lab  as I learned how to run Zeta-potential analysis that tells us the potential difference between the medium and the layer coated around the nanoparticle, which tells us about its stability (the higher the number, the more stable the particle in solution).  However, we are having trouble getting graphs for the controls of TiO2, so we are adding different salts (KNO3 and NaCl) to help stabilize the nanoparticles and get better readings.