Week eight: Conclusions and the Glove Box

With week eight of my time at CMOP done, I have finally come to a firm conclusion. Platinum is the most effective surface modification. Over an average of three trials, platinum, while using hexachloroplatinic acid as the photodeposition reagent, produced 92 percent better degradation rate. Although I am not certain on why the acidic deposition reagent works better than the salt reagent, I hypothesize it is due to a change in pH, and plan to investigate it next week.

Most of the week was spent finishing up testing silver and gold, which both had detrimental results to Caffeine degradation. Near the end of the week I began working with iron. I learned how to use the glove box, which is necessary to keep the system anoxic. My results so far show a trend in data, but not one I can understand.

Next week I will be creating more iron deposited titanium dioxide and running further tests to work out the odd trends in my data and running tests to understand the effect of pH on photodeposition. I was sad to see the undergraduate interns finish their time with CMOP this week. The lab is going to be a lot quieter next week without them there, but I don’t think that is necessarily a good or bad thing.