Hello all!
Here’s a little update on what we’ve accomplished last week:
- I met the RET, Chay, that I’ll be working with for the next 5 weeks.
- I finished writing up the protocol for the MD system and made a cute little diagram to show water flow through the system (pictured).
- We began building a second membrane distillation setup, so that we can be more efficient in running experiments, since it takes a full day to run it and then another almost full day to clean the system with an acid wash.
- We found the approximate feed water concentration at which the flux through the membrane begins to decrease (around 3-3.5X concentration of the NEWT standard brackish solution).
- We got a new cell membrane that has a transparent center (pictured) so that we can monitor changes in the membrane with a cross-sectional microscope in real time while we run it through the system!! I’m very excited about that; I think it’s going to be really fun to see.
- I got to see how an SEM (pictured) works! I was stoked because electron
microscopes have always interested me, and now I actually get a chance to use one to analyze membrane fouling.
Our goals specifically for Week 3 include characterizing membrane fouling by inorganic species during the recovery process and modelling the change in bulk solution chemistry during the water recovery process through equilibrium modelling
. I’m hoping that Chay has a good grasp of the software to do this on, since this week Dr. Perreault and Ana are out of town. If not,we will simply continue to run the system using the new membrane cell and make sure that our previous week’s results are reproducible. Continuity is key!
I’ll be posting a rough draft of my problem statement along with some basic steps to reach the objective of our research this summer very soon. In the meantime, enjoy my dorky scientist selfie. Hope everyone is enjoying their labs as much as I am!
Sky