This week will be my first time getting into the lab. Monday was spent preparing the recipe for the NSF53 Challenge Water. I had to create a spreadsheet of concentrations from a number of molecules. I will be shadowing a few other students working on Rapid Small Scale Column Tests and start to understand what is actually going on and what I will be doing. Learning more of the technical things and then stepping into the process on my own. I will also be cryogrinding the Z-Media that will be used to run some property tests. The density is unknown, other bulk properties need to be known before we can develop a testing process for the removal of Arsenic III and V. For example, we might want to heat the media up to see how that affects the results and properties, but the media contains Chitosan; which may or may not hold well with higher temperatures. It is a matter of lab experience and understanding the media I will be working with this summer. Hopefully, at the end of the week I will have some pictures and more information on what happened. I’m looking forward to it!
Update — SO… I lied. Unfortunately, there is a nice wait for cryogrinding. You have to be certified (obviously) to handle liquid Nitrogen, and I’m guessing we are not going to do that, and the person who is qualified is very busy. Once he has time to do so, another graduate student who is leaving for Korea soon has priority. But then it takes an entire day to decontaminate the grinding machine from media to media. I will be grinding the Z-Media and E33 for comparison in our column tests. But, we can’t do column tests until we know which design setup we are going to use. Which depends on the amount of chemicals we have to make the NSF53 challenge water. Which depends on the volume of water we will be using, and that is still unknown. Which mostly depends on the size and the amount of media we will be using. So, this is a circle in which nothing can be done until cryogrinding has been completed. It probably won’t happen this week.