I
just finished up a couple more week at the Ramachandran lab at Rutgers
University. As mentioned in my previous post, I have been doing a residence
time distribution experiment these past couple weeks. To do this experiment,
you need to granulate the powders using different parameters on the continuous
granulator. But, you must also add 80 mg of the nigrosin dye to the hopper on
the continuous granulator right as you are about to collect the granules from
the granulator. So, to summarize, when the granules are at steady state, you
must add the dye and then directly after, collect the samples in weigh boats
every three seconds for one minute. This procedure was done fifteen times. A
picture of the granulator is below.
A
picture of what the granules looked like after they were collected with the dye
added is below.
After
all the granules were collected and we finished using the continuous
granulator, we transferred the granules from the weigh boats into vials. After
this, we added 10 mL of deionized water into the vials and sonicated the vial
for two hours. After the sonication, the powder and water are separated into
two layers in which the powder is below and liquid is on top. Currently, we are
using the UV-Vis to measure the liquid in the sample. A picture of what a
sample would look like is below.
However,
when doing UV-vis it is absolutely necessary that no powders enter the cuvette
in which the UV-vis will read the sample because it will mess up the reading.
So, in the case of a dark liquid, such as the vial above, we dilute the sample
with deionized water either 100 times or 10 times depending on the color and
how much liquid is present. For the sample above, we would dilute it 100 times
because it is a very dark sample. Because we have over 300 vials, this process
is taking a long time. But, hopefully it will be finished soon.
Aside
from doing research at Rutgers, I have been enjoying my summer vacation by
playing a lot of golf with my brother and father.
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