So, Tuesday and Wednesday I had AP Exams...Today the 1-Octanol finally arrived, and so I could try the methanol/1-octanol/water separations. But first I had to make up solutions like I did on Monday with the methanol and water. Firstly, I had to figure out the percentages for the solutions I had to make, and I had to make sure that they were all single face. So I came up with 10 combinations of percentages, and then I converted them to masses to see approximately how much of the solutions I had to measure out. Then I did the measuring, making a total of 10 different solutions of methanol/1-octanol/water.
After making the solutions I injected them one by one into the Gas Chromatograph and let it do it's job. Unfortunately for me, I hadn't changed the settings from Monday so the GC stopped after 4 minutes which means that I did not get peaks for the 1-octanol that was in the solutions I had injected. So I had to go back and re-do the injections, with each separation taking a whole 13 minutes! All the separations took me the whole day to finish, and I even decided to put in some extra hours just so I could be sure I was on the right track with every thing.
Besides it being a very long day...it was very fun. And today Prof. Wainright decided to let me do everything by myself which made me feel great about my skills for doing the experiments and I felt very independent!
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