This week I was very busy. Last week we had a few setbacks with the making of a film and planned to do a variety of tests and possibly rework out procedures for making a membrane on porous aluminum oxide.
Last Friday I took flux measurements on various membranes including the ones we had made earlier in the week. On Monday I entered the data I took from the flux measurements and entered it into Excel. I used Excel to graph the data.
On Monday I also began writing a research report that would be needed for our meeting on Wednesday. In the report I first laid out the objectives for our research and then explained the experimental procedures we used. I then included the flux measurement graphs and explained the significance of the data we had taken. On Tuesday, Syed had scheduled us to use the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The SEM center at UK is way down in the basement and there are these giant hallways for cars and golf carts to drive through.
A Hitachi 4300 Scanning Electron Microscope
The SEM uses an electron beam in order to visualize an object that is possibly only nanometers wide. We spent two house working with the SEM to characterize the materials we had made. Unfortunately we were unable to find the pores on our Aluminum-oxide substrate. We scheduled another session for later that day, to test the glass slides we had also prepared. They showed some signs of pores but we were not able to get the resolution required with the SEM we were using. On Tuesday I also continued to prepare the research report and included all of our discoveries made with the scanning electron microscope.
An image of aluminum oxide taken with the SEM
On Wednesday Syed, Shanshan (the other grad student I work with), and I had a meeting in the morning with Dr. Knutson and Dr. Rankin. Syed and I mostly talked about the problems we were facing with Titania on a porous substrate. Dr. Rankin and Dr. Knutson gave us a few ideas of what to do next.
Later that day I prepared another surface modification on Aluminum-oxide. On Thursday I prepared Titania and tried a different method for calcining the membrane. I also managed to get an employee parking pass making getting to work much easier.
Outside of my internship I really haven’t found much to do in Kentucky. I commute about an hour a day and deal with the not so great Kentucky drivers. I have also found that the city of Lexington has absolutely no city planning to it.
On Friday Syed and I used the XRD (Xray diffractometer) to see whether if the pores in our samples were ordered or not.
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