Week 8

There is an ongoing joke this summer of me switching projects every 2 weeks. Well guess what…it has been two weeks since I made the last switch so in keeping with tradition of the summer I have a new project! Well sort of. After two weeks of trying to get the uv/vis to monitor my samples accurately I have found that the uv/vis is terrible at monitoring solutions containing anything other that de-ionized water (and sometimes not even that). Samples containing NOM or any sort of stabilizer had too much interference to be able to observe the reaction accurately. So my new project is to use HPLC (high pressure/performance liquid chromatography) to study the reaction of nitrobenzene and nano iron and hopefully get better results. HPLC separates a solution into fractions and will allow me to only see the concentration of nitrobenzene, instead of everything in the sample that absorbs at 267nm. Sample prep will be identical as before; however observing the reaction will obviously be different. HPLC is a really cool tool that will hopefully allow me to accurately quantify the reaction kinetics. I'm pretty bummed that the uv/vis didn't work, but I'm also excited about the prospects of the HPLC working!