Team:Exeter/Notebook/August12
Wednesday, 12 August
Lab Work
Adam and Nina conducted an experiment to determine how temperature would affect CaCO3 precipitation by mixing together CaCl2 and NaCO3 solutions which they had prepared the day before.
Solutions with varying ratios of CaCl2 to NaCO3 were either placed in a water bath at 70C for 6 minutes, or 30C for 18 hours. Two solutions (of 150uL CaCL2 and 1500uL NaCO3) were left at room temperature, one for 6 minutes and the other for 18 hours, as a control.
Afterwards, the solutions were centrifuged to separate the pellet from the supernatant, and both end products were studied under a light microscope at 20x magnification:
Collaboration with Experts/Industry
We had a Zoom meeting with Professor Mike Allen, who was enthusiastic to hear about our project. We asked him about where it would be applicable in industry, and he directed us towards one company (Protein Technologies) and reminded us of the importance of public relations – if people outside of industry don't have a positive perception of our product then people within industry are unlikely to adopt it.
Afterwards he emailed us a list of contacts who might be able to share some expertise related to our project. He sent us contact details for Jonathan Teague (a PhD student at the University of Bristol working on developing remotely-operated underwater vehicles for assessing coral health), Dr Glen Wheeler (a member of the Marine Biology Association working on marine algae and particularly coccolithospores), Chris Evans (a PhD student working on using high-speed atomic force microscopy to observe coccolithospores) and Dr Sam Stevens (a lecturer at our university with an interest in biocrystallisation and bioimaging).
Hydrogels and Modelling
Velizar finalised the implicit CO2 diffusion model and finished writing the paper on CO2 diffusion modelling, viewable here.