Week five: Chance brings small success

This week consisted of many more tests of titanium dioxide and a lovely surprise in one of them. I photodeposited more pieces of titanium dioxide with platinum with varying deposition times and tested them under the solar simulator with caffeine as a model contaminant. Unfortunately despite varying deposition times, the platinized TiO2 degraded the caffeine much slower.

But this week I found that to succeed in the science field, you need a little luck. On Thursday my front line mentor Amanda decided to try photodepositing platinum with the solar simulator, rather than the mercury lamp I have been using, because the Puralytic’s device she has been running tests on was in need of repair. The resulting pieces were a grayish color, rather than the yellow color of the pieces I had been making using the mercury lamp.

When I tested the new pieces Amanda had created with caffeine, the degradation rate was not a large improvement over bare TiO2, but the rate was not worse. Although the improvement might not be large enough to be cost effective in the Puralytic’s water purification device, the data is still promising. The modification data had been discouraging until Friday, thanks to the chance that Amanda tried something new.