Week two: bottles as Barbies

This week I started what will be a long, and hopefully prosperous, relationship with the solar simulator. It’s the power of the sun, at the flip of a switch. It also risks a sunburn, so I wear glasses, a face shield, gloves, and long sleeves whenever I use it. Because titanium dioxide is a photocatalyst, I will be using the simulator a lot this summer to test out my surface modifications.

My first encounter with the solar simulator was on Tuesday when I ran a test using red dye, which degrades under light, to prepare for a test on Thursday. On Thursday I tested bottles of red dye to ensure the solar simulator equal distributes light so future experiments will be valid. I like to think of the bottles of red dye as Barbie dolls: I created foil “jackets” and placed them in their “tanning bed.” Their “jackets” prevent the red dye from reacting with light besides the “tanning bed,” which is how I like to refer to the solar simulator.

I used the spectrophometer to test for absorbency to measure how the red dye degraded. It was not as friendly as the solar simulator and gave me grief when I used plastic cuvettes. Luckily, it likes quartz cuvettes better and once I switched my data became much less erratic. Interestingly, I also found that when testing the same sample of water repetitively, bubbles form in the cuvette and change the absorbency. After switching to quartz cuvettes, the red dye test concluded well.  

The highlight of the week really came on Wednesday, when some of the high school interns and I went on a research “cruise” to collect water samples with the Saturday Academy oceanography camp. We went out of the little port of Ilwaco, Washington to a beautiful day on the sea. There I learned not only how to take water samples and test for salinity, temperature, and turbidity, but that bananas on a boat are bad luck. They attract monkeys that break the engine. Despite an intern bringing not one, but two bananas for lunch, we survived the trip.

Overall it was a productive week. After running a few more tests on the solar simulator, I should be starting to prepare my surface modified titanium dioxide and testing it under the solar simulator. Although it may be a gloomy summer outdoors, I will be spending a lot of time under the lovely light of the solar simulator (with skin protection, of course).