Dominique Escandon - NJIT Lab Week 2

I'm finally back in my lab after a long hiatus due to forms and such. I really missed it, so it's great to be back! My first day was exciting, since the grad student I work with showed me his other project, which involves plasma to make a nitrogen polymers which can be used as catalysts. He said that he uses the same chemicals that are found in cars that, upon impact, explode and inflate the safety airbags. This is fairly dangerous, considering if he ever heats it up to much it'll either dissociate or explode, and probably the reason why he and my PI decided that I shouldn't work on this project. He actually places the chemicals inside a vacuum plasma ray (so that there's no oxygen, which produces a more red-ish light so you always know whether or not it's present) and leaks in hydrogen and/or argon gas. The light emitted from the ray is a product of the gases being ionized by radio frequency.

This system is also entirely homemade! You can see in the picture that there is a ring around the tube, just about halfway along it's length. That actually creates a magnetic field in the tube, and the light around/under it is the most purple. 

Mostafa (the grad student) cut off the hydrogen gas so that only argon gas was being emitted and it created a more purple light, as opposed to hydrogen's pink hue. 

Mostafa also told me that in the days before, a beam of orange light was being emitted from the chemicals he had placed into the ray, which was actually giving him really good results. On the day I visited he actually evaporated all the water from his chemical solution, and the orange light did not appear. Turns out, the humidity level in New Jersey actually helped out his experiment! When the chemicals are damp is when they work the best for his purposes. 

I also got to go out to lunch with a friend who is working nearby and my old french teacher, which was so fun and amazing. We took the NJ Transit to Newark Penn Station and had lunch at this delicious Brazilian burger place. 

However, today was a little bit more difficult. I worked on my carbon nanotubes in the morning, and in the afternoon another grad student came in and started to show me how to operate the biofuel cell system that I will be working with. The setup was easy, but conceptually I am a bit lost. Right now, I am only working with half of a fuel cell -- one of it's electrodes, I can chose which one -- and the data I expected to see was very different to what I actually got. I am so glad I took physics this year or else I would be even more lost than I am now. Thankfully, I was given a notebook of someone who had recently done some work with the biofuel cell. It is full of data and hopefully, assisted with Google, I will be able to use it to make sense of my project!

I look forward to tackling this new challenge and hope I can make the best of my time here!