Data and the Water Treatment Field Trip!

So our machine is up and running this past week.

We are using Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) to measure the Tg or the glass transition temperature and Tni (Transition temperature from nematic to isotropic).

Luckily, most of my samples were already made so I just put them in the machine and every 76 minutes I would put a sample in.

I’ve also had to input all my data into excel and make graphs, which I’m still working on.  This reminds me of the ExxonMobile trip we had and how the engineers there said to make sure students know how to use excel if they want to be engineers.  In the future, I would like to incorporate use of excel to plot data in chemistry.  It makes students analyze the relationship between two variables rather than just passively doing an experiment.

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The field trip was fun even though we didn’t get to tour.  It was informational. I attached all the pictures I took. Somehow the pictures are always flipped so you might have to download it to see it correctly and not all pics came out with good quality.

 

WANTED: Dead or Alive (but probably dead)

The trip to the City of Houston water treatment facility was truly an incredible experience! There were so many things to learn from at the learning center, and I found myself jotting down what felt like hundreds of interesting facts to share with my students later. Our guides were very knowledgeable and they shared with us multiple interesting activities that we could bring back to our classrooms.

One set of items in particular that caught my eye in the learning center was a collection of WANTED posters detailing water-borne pathogens that have wreaked havoc around the world (pictures below). I absolutely loved the creativity of these posters. They were simultaneously engaging, informative, and even made me laugh at some of their creative phrasing. At first, I thought about how much I would love to have these exact posters in my classroom, but after thinking a bit more I came upon an even better idea.

           

The past two years, I have used project-based learning for our virus and bacteria unit. Previously, I’ve had my students create booklets that could be used to inform patients on the differences between viral & bacterial diseases and their treatments. How fun would it be to somehow incorporate a WANTED poster component? They could be modeled directly after the posters that we saw in the center, providing the same type of information about how they make you sick and their method of transmission and reproduction. As I was thinking about this and looking at the posters, I realized they were a bit out of date. It looks like the last time they were updated was 10 years ago, so many of the “last known location” dates and places are now incorrect. That gave me another idea. How amazing would it be if we could actually team up with the learning center and have students design posters/exhibit components that could actually be implemented in the learning center? I have now made a new commitment to myself to see if there is a way that we could make this happen so that my students can engage in a project that will challenge them to build a final product that will ultimately have an influence that reaches beyond the confines of our classroom.

July 2-6

It was programmed a second part of GUI. This part displays and analyse the bi-harmonic pulse, its first and second derivatives. It displays also important points on these curves, like the systolic and diastolic peaks, dicrotic notch, and other points on the first and second derivatives useful to determine vascular information.

 

The computed values displayed in this analysis results window are

-Systolic and Diastolic Peaks            -Systolic-Diastolic Interval

-Systolic Amplitude                                -Augmentation Index

-Dicrotic Notch                                         -Pulse Interval

-Crest Time                                                  -Vascular Age

-Arterial Stiffness Index                        -Vascular Aging Index

-Peripheral Resistance                           -APG Waveform Types

The next steps are:

-Improve GUI data reading and first data analysis capabilities. Improve algorithm to calculate vascular age.  Create more efficient optimization algorithms to determine critical points.  Include more harmonics in the analysis.

 

Largest Inland Desalination Plant in the World!!

With less than two weeks left it has changed into crunch time.  Nevertheless, it was nice to take a break from all the lab work and visit the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Desalination Plant in El Paso.  We were informed that it is the largest inland desalination plant in the world.  It is also amazing to know that representatives from various countries visit El Paso just to tour the desalination plant.

Here are some pics of joyous adventure.

This elephant was a gift from a local artist. The elephant is composed of trash and debris found at a storm drain. Its display is being used to raise awareness about the detrimental impacts of illegal dumping.
Main corridor at the Educational Building of the Desalination Plant.
Reverse Osmosis Unit. The plant has five of them.
Fellow interns following and listening to Mr. Sepulveda (Plant Superintendent) during our tour.
Fellow Interns

We had a great time.

Week 4 – Data starting to come together for poster

Week was productive with acquiring data about the self-assembling peptide hydrogels using the Rheometer, CD Spectrometer and IR Spectrometer.  I am having to review information about functional groups that I have not read since Organic II Chemistry and Graduate School. Geez … I forgot how “unintuitive” and complicated reading spectroscopy data is because of correlating functional groups with their wavelengths.  For example at the lab meeting it was explained that  the negative “dip” at around 215-220nm in the CD Spectroscopy graph indicates the protein self-assembled into beta sheets. I am still working on explaining the graph even though I now know “what” the data should look like. I am learning the latest version of Excel to graph my data (see below). 

I started working on the poster Friday.  Although I still need to truncate some data points at the beginning, I think the graphs will be good enough for the poster.  I just have to overlay the data series into one graph.

 

 

Looking a Problem Sideways

I have always though the reason the students in my school do badly on tests, other than lack of test taking skills and inherent inflated egos, is that they don’t know how to read and generally lack perseverance.  Of course most people tend to approach problems with straight forward, brute force solutions so we use drill and kill test practice sessions, and train all our teachers as reading teachers. There is nothing, in particular, wrong with this other than the fact that drill and kill only teaches student to fry fish that are given to them, not to catch the fish, and I should no more be teaching reading than an english teacher should teach math.  This is not being insulting, it is just that on more than one occasion an humanities teacher has seen a math problem on the internet, taught it, and then I spend my class unteaching the misconception.

That does not mean that we all should be teaching kids to read, and to work problems creatively and with persistence.  We should, which is why I love using computers as a teaching tool and explicitly teaching computer skills and coding.

I can’t tell you the number of times when a students has asked me where to click a web page, and when I say look for the assignment, they just randomly scroll up and down, refusing to even decode.  They will do this for a long time, hoping to frustrate me until I do the reading for them.  I won’t do it.  They need to learn to read, and to make an effort to decode if they have not reached that level.  If they cannot decode the words on a web page, how can they hope to comprehend the questions on a test?

Coding is a similar situation.  I have been working on my lesson plan this week, which is a maker project to collect data and store it for later analysis.  I have several resources listed in the assignment.  These resources are written, and are a curated set of the documentation I used to learn the device and how to program the maker project.  To succeed the students are going to have read this documentation, comprehend it, and apply it to the problem.

Coding itself is an exercise in reading.  The grammar is very precise.  In python a misplaced space is an error.  Students must be able to read and comprehend the code, separating the tokens that are critical from the strings that informational.   When starting coding, students have a great deal of trouble because they are simply trying to copy, just like they do in all the other classes, without decoding or comprehending.  Breaking them of this habit, forcing them to work the problem, not memorize a solution, is a primarily goal in every class, not just in computer classes.

In this maker project, simply copying the code was not enough.  There was a bug in the code, or a misunderstand on my part.  The file was not saving, and most of my time was spent dealing with it.  This is the ultimate form of comprehension and problems solving that we should be teaching.  Perseverance.  Use failure a tool for learning.  Hope for a fortuitous accident where a clue emerges, and be vigilant enough to identify the clue.  As we learn when we do research, even if we do not solve the problem, identifying and dispersing a clue is a success in itself.

Bigger doesn’t mean better

Hello everyone!

This week in the N.E.W.T. lab at ASU we shifted our focus from small columns with crushed media to large columns with larger media to see if it worked as well, or better, than the small columns at removing bromide from water. I test some of the same media that I have been using (GCU blank, Clemsen GAC with silver,  Silver impregnated activated carbon) and a new media that is commonly used in water filtration called Purolite. The large columns were so much easier to pack and they all could run water through them with no pressure. It was so nice! Unfortunately, the columns did not work very well at removing organics. They reach a 50% breakthrough of organic compounds almost instantly. I hypothesized that the crushed worked better because there was more surface area for the organics to come in contact with and less space between the media. I will be interested to see if it removed bromide at all.

I was able to learned 2 new skills this week: sieving and silver impregnation. The silver impregnation procedure came from Clemsen and we wanted to replicate what they have done to see if we got the same results. What was different about this procedure is that they use Nitric acid to oxidize the carbon. That part was a little scary because when I was heating it to 90 degrees Celsius, the solution started bubbling and fuming. I survived though. We added to Silver Nitrate to the GAC and Zeolite media. I forgot how Silver Nitrate can stain your hands so I still have little black spots on my hand. The last step was to crush the media to 90 microns. This takes forever! I was covered in black carbon after.

We tested the media I made today along with a commercial Zeolite that was impregnated with silver. I couldn’t get the commercial Zeolite or the GAC with silver that I made to work, but I am very interested to see how my Zeolite with silver works at removing bromide.

I should finally get my bromide results back next Monday. Wish me luck!

(Unfortunately, my server wont let me attach pictures. I will try again when I get home. Sorry!)

-Taylor

New Week a New Protocol

FOURTH OF JULY

This week the lab was considerably quieter. With our undergrad still sick and my mentor working on a manuscript at home I had a lot of time in the lab by myself. I continued to work on the old protocol and start writing and refining my abstract. I continue to look at the same papers that I have read about ATPE and try to find new ones that use different molecular weights of the polymers that form the two phases. I have gotten to a place where I have almost mastered the oxidation protocol using TCCA to separate semi-metallic SWCNTs from metallic SWCNTs. It’s weird that my separation works better after incubating over night so I will be looking into why this may be by changing the centrifugation next week.

All SWCNTs are in the top phase before the addition of TCCA.
After the addition of TCCA the semi-metallic SWCNTs are found in the top phase. While the bottom phase has no clear properties.
After waiting overnight there is a clear separation of phases with an aggregate at the interphase.
Semi-metallic SWCNTs rich top phase is in the cuvette on the left while metallic SWCNTs rich bottom phase is in the cuvette on the right.

DATA

I run my cuvettes containing samples in the spectroscopy machine. During the weekly meeting we went over my results. I am now getting a much better sample of semi-metallics than before. The absorbance, however, looks off. So next week I will be working on getting a clearer bottom phase, currently it looks cloudy. I also will be looking into why the separation works better if I let the eppendorf tube incubate over night.

Reading the data as it is collected with the NS1 machine.

NEW PROTOCOL

I’ve mentioned that I was using different molecular weights which resulted in poor separation. It turns out that the new molecular weights are supposed to be used with DNA wrapped SWCNTs rather than surfactant wrapped SWCNTs. Knowing this, I was given a new protocol to use with the molecular weights. I have only run one trial with this new protocol. It uses a VERY small amount of substances because DNA is much more expensive than the surfactants that I had been using.

First attempt of separating DNA wrapped SWCNTs using Dx 250 and PEG 1.5 following a new procedure.

Sunshine!

The beginning of the week greeted us with a day of sun, so we ran out to do experiments!  We tested how well three different types of nanoparticles absorbed and released energy from the sun.

Throughout the rest of the week, I shadowed a Jordin Metz, a graduate student in our lab, as he made copper nanoparticles.  He may not know it, but he’s a great teacher.  He walked us through every step of the process, answered questions, asked questions that made us think and remember material, and made sure we participated in all of the lab procedures.  I was able to sneak in a few pictures of him teaching Ifeoluw Adebiyi, a participant in the REU program, how to use a FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy) machine.

On Thursday, I had the honor to present our findings to Dr. Halas’ research group.  I can’t say I wasn’t nervous; it’s always difficult to give a speech to a large group of people, especially when those people are the top researchers in their field.  But at the same time, it was invigorating to field questions and go discuss possible steps to take in the future.  I even had a chance to watch the Halas Group perfect a presentation for a conference coming up next week.  They gave me several ideas to take back into the classroom, such as making sure your first and last slides create an impact.  You want people to be interested at the beginning of your talk and have something to take away at the end.

I can’t believe there are only a couple of weeks left!  There is still so much to learn and to do!

First Results on Gold Silica

Finally I have finished the data analysis on NanoScope software.

3 samples were analyzed, each had about 8-10 different locations scanned on both sides: Clean and dirty(No PDMS exposed and PDMS exposed).

Each scan has about 10-20 data regions and in total I had about 200+ data for each sample to work on statistics.

Goal is to compare the remaining residue on the surface to find out the best PDMS as a transfer agent, less residue is better!

4 approaches:

1- Raw data – no touch up

2- Statistical touch up: Mid 70% average; excluding first and last 15% range.

3- Finding the statistical frequency – probability distribution and according to the weighted regions of 70% finding the average.

4- Since #3 messed up on 10.0 /1 sample, I had to come up with the 4th approach, which is excluding the PDMS exposed regions if it is less than average of mid 70% of the clean side.

Boss liked the results and wanted to test more 🙂

Prepared more polymers yesterday and they are curing in the incubator now!

Will analyze the data for SiO2 surface.