Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Thirteenth Day of Project


So yesterday was a bit challenging! I had to make up more solutions of methanol/1-octanol/water, but this time they had to be 2-phase solutions; which means that after I make them they should phase separate. I started off with the calculations, figuring out the percentage combinations that would give me solutions that would phase separate - and to help me with that I used the graph generated by UNIF (a program used to generate information without doing the actual experiments). After getting all the percentage combinations, I figured out the masses of the components I would actually need to make the solutions based on the percentages. The math didn't take that long, and so I went on to making the solutions. Obviously I wasn't getting the exact masses I was supposed to based on the calculations (they were pretty close though), so I after making up 10 solutions, I sat down again with the calculated and calculated the exact percentages of the methanol, water and 1-octanol I had ACTUALLY put in the solutions. (The I had to shake the solutions, and let them settle and phase separate)!




TODAY... I started doing the injections on the GC. So I have to make 20 injections (bottom layer and top layer for each solution). Each injection takes about 13 minutes..and then I have to wait for the GC to cool down to the initial temperature of 40 degrees celsius from a final temperature of 190 degrees celsius! So doing a total of 20 injections takes, pretty much, a long time. So, I did injections for 8 solutions, and I took some of the areas under the peaks in the different graphs, for the different layers of the different solutions! (I will at some point have to put the data on Excel and create some graphs out of it).
Lot of work...I feel like I am working as much as people who have "REAL" jobs!

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