Week 3: All's Well That Ends Well

This past week was fairly uneventful as we had our fair share of setbacks early in the week. On Monday I set up batch reactors that would equilibriate over night and be used in the morning for new tests on 1,2-DCP, 1,3-DCP, or allyl chloride (it wasn't decided yet). Unfortunately, on Tuesday morning, after running some preliminary tests on where each reactant would peak on the GC, I found that the noise from the hexanes was in direct conflict with all three of the reactants we were going to look at and therefore the results would not be very accurate. By this time, the Zn64 in the batch reactors I made up on Monday had equilibriated well over 24 hours and to keep consistentcy in the data, were not able to be used. Also, it was too late for me to make up new reactors for Wednesday in order to leave a 24 hour equilibrium period and still have time for an experiment.

On Wednesday I made up two reactors to redo some of the TCP experiments I did last week. A reactor was made with 20g Zn64 as well as 10g Zn64 in order to better determine the affect of changing the concentration of Zn has on the reaction. Thursday morning I started the experiment. The reactor with 20g almost fully reacted in the first day and showed a distinct psuedo-first order rate. The 10g reactor, on the other hand, did not show any reaction on the first day, so it was left until Friday to finish the testing. The reaction did occur on Friday, but it was much faster than expected and therefore more results and research are needed to determine the cause.