Dominique Escandon - Week 5 - NJIT

Last week was pretty exciting! We're getting pretty close to 10 mW of power towards our fuel cell, which is a big feat on it's own. We've completely roughly 4 fuel cells so far, and the by the way this is going, we should be able to get our work published by the end of next year as my lab partner's Master's thesis. 

We spent the week preparing carbon nanotubes (we always need fresh ones for our fuel cells but the filtration process can take DAYS) and finally once they were all set up we measured the polarization curve of fuel cell containing only Glucose Oxidase and Laccase in powdered form. We measured this curve by changing the resistance of the circuit by thousands. This is really to compared the cell to different cell designs, in order to really be able to determine what cell type gives us the highest power density.

The plan for this week is to test out carbon nanotubes that are suspended overnight in their respective enzyme solutions (as opposed to our former method of hand-compressing the enzymes onto the CNTs) and test out using platinum instead of Laccase for the anode. As the project progresses, we will look into compressing the enzymes with carbon nanotubes (and using Nafion as an adhesive) by machine and possibly using gold or NAD for the anode. The record right now for biofuel cell lifetime is one year, which was achieved by a group out in France who compressed the enzymes by machine. Hopefully we will be able to reach above and beyond that marker! 

I officially only have about 2 weeks left in my lab -- it feels so weird to know that I will be leaving when so many things are still unfinished but I'm looking forward to spending the rest of the summer with my family in Ecuador. 

Have a great week everyone!