Andrew Mah, Entry #2, Getting to the Experiment

My third week at the Khalizov lab went well. This week was not so packed in terms of the work I had to do in the lab, but I learned a number of fundamentals/concepts required to understand the experiment from my graduate student, Matt.

My week started off with a fire drill on Monday morning. I was aware beforehand that NJIT has a lot of safety issues, and my lab safety training proctor told everyone last month that NJIT paid over $270,000 just in fines this year. When I left the building, I smelled something burning in the hallways. When we returned to the building after 30 minutes, Dr. Khalizov told us that someone tried to start a combustion reaction outside of the fume hood. I wonder why someone would even start one in the first place.

In terms of the project, John and I are in charge of the denuders, inlet, and the heating box. While we will be able to conduct some trials once the mass spectrometry is all built and working, we are not involved in actually building the mass spectrometry. Matt and Dr. Khalizov are currently working on it for the past week. Although everything is built now, there is significant noise in the positive ion mode, which may prevent some ions from being detected properly. This issue caused some delay in the experiment I hoped to conduct this week.

While Matt and Dr. Khalizov were busy working to fix the machine, I worked on a few things. First, I prepared the inlet we will be using for the experiment by putting in the dried glass wool, soaked in glutaric acid, into the inlet. The inlet will be the place where helium converts the elemental mercury to gaseous oxidized mercury. We will be testing out this with a non-poisonous organic acid, glutaric acid, before using a toxic solution such as mercury bromide or mercury chloride.

I also connected a nitrogen line to the fume hood to make the process of drying the denuders quicker. Using a copper tube, I made a connection from the liquid nitrogen gas tank to the fume hood, where all my denuders will be prepared. During this process, I learned how to use swageloks to connect lines. I expect to test out the liquid nitrogen next week.

During my spare time in the lab, Matt began talking to John and me more, and he showed us how the mass spectrometry and the fast reactor are set up. He told us about the process of using a vacuum to lower the pressure of the reagent ions in the mass spectrometry and the way a plasma in the mass spectrometry allows electrical conduction. There is definitely a lot to understand in the $100,000 machine.