I spent a fair part of last week playing with this particular set of equipment, trying to get it to work. The details are too boring to go into, but I spent about 3 days just trying to get the equipment to work. I then spent about two days working with some PDMS (VT manufactured) ferrofluid. It turns out that the PDMS ferrofluid is possibly one of the most difficult samples to work with for this kind of measurement, mostly because it is so viscous. Instead of forming a nice droplet shape (neccessary for this kind of measurement), it comes out of the syringe still tube shaped. To understand the system I am dealing with, imagine trying to make toothpaste form a nice droplet shape - except the toothpaste in this case is brown, magnetically responsive and coming out of a syringe tip 1mm in diameter.
After another two afternoons of work, and I had a single measurement for the PDMS ferrofluid in water (ideally I would have measured a value for the fluid in glycerol). By this stage it was late on Friday afternoon and I was getting worried - I won't be able to use the equipment much next week because it will be used for undergraduate labs most of the day. After consulting with Dr Davis and Dr Riffle, I arranged to have access to the lab this afternoon. After a leisurely Sunday sleep-in, Dr Riffle collected me from my place and we went into the lab.
This afternoon, rather than trying the PDMS ferrofluid again, I decided to try and make a measurement with my commercial ferrofluid sample. Finally, some success! Not only were we able to measure a value in glycerol (and also in water and then mixtures of glycerol and water), but the results I was able to get possibly explain one of the odd effects I had been seeing with my droplets. We worked until 9pm getting as much as we could done, and I am now hoping I can get a few hours access during the week - because I have another experiment in mind.
In other news, I caught up with Thompson over the weekend. I met up with him at his friend's place on Friday night, which was a whole heap of fun. When I arrived, there were two mormons sitting inside - the girls who lived there invited them in and asked them to stay for dinner. They then proceeded to offer them a range of beverages they couldn't have. There were also a whole bunch of other people, and we sat, chatted, laughed and generally had a good time.
Saturday afternoon Thompson met up with me and we went to a favourite old haunt of his - The Cellar. After that, we went back to the same friend's place as the previous day (where Thompson was staying), and had dinner again. As well as several of the same people from the previous night, I also got to meet a few new people. After dinner, we played a game a lot like 'Taboo' - but using an application on someone's iphone to give the words to be guessed. We made teams of boys vs girls, and it was a lot of fun. At one point, Thompson was trying to get his team to guess 'Time Travel', and said "They recently introduced this element on 'Lost'", to which his friend Lee responded "Titanium?" I laughed, but everyone else missed it - and Lee and I bonded after that. Ahh, good old science jokes. The whole group is a really great bunch of people - and I've been invited to dinner again on Tuesday =)
No comments:
Post a Comment