It has been another exciting and long week at the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at UK.
Memorial Hall at University of Kentucky commemorates americans who lost their lives in World War I
This week I spent a lot of time characterizing polymer coated aluminum oxide. Syed has been busy fixing his manuscript that was just sent back from review to be published in a materials journal.
This week I have also been working with Shanshan on preparing a lipid bilayer on silica and titania. Preparing a lipid bilayer on these materials is very challenging. Adding to this, there is very little literature on the matter so we have to experiment with it a lot.
Lipids include fats and waxes and are complicated to work with. They have to be kept hydrated and we use a special solution to keep them hydrated when we are not characterizing them. The hardest part of working with lipids is that they want to stay in vesicle form something like a water droplet, but we need them to form a uniform layer over our material. The other issue is that it is extremely difficult to characterize a lipid bilayer versus a vesicle.
We looked through a normal microscope (still extremely high quality) to see if the bilayer had formed and had pretty inconclusive results. We showed these results to Dr. Rankin and Dr. Knutson, who were certainly not satisfied with our data.
On Wednesday I spent a lot of time cleaning glass slides. The glass slides we use come in a brick formation that you have to cut apart with a razor blade. We keep them in sulfuric acid and then clean them with de-ionized water and ethanol. It takes forever. Later I prepared a surface modification on the glass and aluminum oxide.
On Thursday I disposed of some hazardous waste and then went on to clean some beakers and other various glassware. In the afternoon I went to Shanshan’s lab and prepared silica for our next lipid bilayer experiment. Later that afternoon we went to take some SEM images of the polymer coated alumina (aluminum-oxide).
On Friday I prepared titania on a an alumina substrate that I had modified earlier in the week. The samples came out looking promising and the Flux measurements were consistent between the two of them. I think I am coming close to a breakthrough in my research!
A sample that I prepared for SEM imaging. We use a black carbon tape that is super sticky.
My host family has been gone all week so I have been cooking at home. I also went flying again this week.
The Diamond DA-20 I have been flying
I should note driving in the rainstorms in Kentucky has been truly terrifying.
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