Week 3- Developing Reaction Rate Models for Nitro Compounds

As I am continuing to talk to Ali and Paul, I am beginning to understand more about the significance of the research that I am doing. The reason I am doing these trials to figure out the reaction rates of nitro compounds is because of concern about environmental contamination by munitions compounds (especially near manufacturing facilities and military training sites). One way to help prevent some of this contamination is to use compounds that are more environmentally friendly—less toxic, less likely to accumulate, and they will persist in the environment for shorter periods of time. That last part is the part I am working on; determining how long current and potential munitions compounds will persist in the environment… Basically, reaction rates!

This week I got to work with TNT! Every time I tell my friends that I am working with TNT as part of my internship, the first thing they say is “Cool!! So you get to blow stuff up?” They’re wrong, of course, but it is still fun to get that reaction out of people. This Monday, the Tratnyek lab team had a group meeting to get up to speed on what everyone has been working on. I got to prepare a few slides with my nitrobenzene results on them, and make some decisions about how to proceed with the TNT trials, because unlike NB, we didn’t have a rate constant from a previous experiment to compare to.

After the first trial, with 4.29μM FeP, I used the k-observed to get a rough estimate of the K_[FeP] so that I could estimate the half life of TNT in FeP. It’s a lot faster than NB—which was on the order of hours or days—based on my estimate, and so far the data has been backing me up, the half life of TNT ranges from 30 minutes to as fast as 4 or 5! That means that I had to be quick about taking aliquots out of the reaction vial, so that I can actually observe what is happening as it happens.

I didn’t get to wrap up the TNT experiments, because we ran out of the nitrogen/hydrogen gas mixture that we use in the glovebox, so I’ll get to do those next week. However, even without the final two FeP TNT trials, I am generating some good data. I’m pretty stoked about the data processing and graphing software that I am using. It’s called Igor, and it is similar to Microsoft excel, only much more extensive. The learning curve is pretty steep, it is definitely not easy software to work with, but it is allowing me to generate some pretty detailed graphs and accurate lines of best fit.