Monday: Today we finished analyzing some of the results from last week because we weren't able to get all of it done. Dr. Panikar met with Dr. Ramachandran in order to update him on what we have been doing and he was very pleased with our progress. He also gave us some pointers for what to do next and also how we could improve our experiments. Lastly, he told us to put all of the results in slides so that he could see our results and then give us a better picture of what he wants.
Tuesday: Today we made a plan for characterizing our particles. Dr. Panikar and I teamed up with someone named Ashu who will be doing particle characterization for APAP while we will be doing it for Alumina. This includes particle size distribution, solubility, hydrophobicity, finding out the agglomerate size, making tablets for extrudability, and finding out a good water content for the particles. After making the plan, we began the particle size distribution experiment. Although we already had the particle size (50 to 60 um), we wanted to confirm the value by running it through the laser diffraction system. I forgot if I already explained this but to measure particle size, it blows the particles up in the air and a laser flashes on the particle. A shadow is then created and then the size of the shadow is measured. That is the particle size. We were going to move onto the hydrophobicity experiment but because gov school kids were in Rutgers doing some experiments, they took the hydrophobicity station so we were unable to do that experiment. We didn’t have enough time to start another experiment so we called it a day.
Wednesday-Thursday: I didn’t really do much for the rest of the week because I was working on the powerpoint. Dr. Ramachandran wanted to see our results by Friday so Dr. Panikar wanted me to complete the powerpoint by Thursday. Obviously the powerpoint didn’t take me 2 full days to finish so in the middle, I would help her with some of her experimental work. But mostly, I was working on making the powerpoint with our results from the RTD.
Friday: Today we finalized the powerpoint and met with Dr. Ramachandran. He said that our results were good but there was a slight problem. RTD is supposed to be a bell curve starting from 0, reaching a max, and then approaching zero. Our graph had the same behavior except that instead of starting and ending at 0, it started and ended at 10. This was weird because we did all of our calculations correctly. Dr. Ramachandran also asked us to change some of the variables such as flow rate and RPM of the muller and see how that affects the RTD. I think he may want Dr. Panikar to write a paper on RTD. When we went back to see what was wrong, we were unable to conclude the reason for our incorrect graph. So I thought that maybe if we use Matlab, then we would get a clearer graph rather than using excel.
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