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I love my septa!

One week to go! I can’t believe the summer has gone by so fast. I really feel comfortable here. Hmmmm, graduate school? Hahaha! No really, I know people, feel comfortable visiting other labs, getting coffee. Anne (Anne’s Deli) and I are buds. I see her without fail everyday around 9:00 am. And without fail when I ask for a none fat 16 oz. latte she always replies, “ok, 1 low fat 16 oz. latte”. I love it!

My research is coming along pretty well too. Recently my TCE degradation, with various iron samples, has really illustrated 1st order kinetics (that is good). Each batch experiment takes around 6-7 days to really follow and gather enough data to analyze. Because these experiments are a little slower then say an experiment where you could see 3 half-lives in a day a few fairly important questions have come up.

One of the most important of these being, “is the degradation we see coming from TCE depletion or is there a chance our septa, after multiple punctures, is leaking TCE?” A simple way for me to test this was run a batch experiment without iron (without anything for the TCE to react with) and watch the concentration of TCE over 6-7 days. Well, today is day 3 and voila my [TCE] is essentially that of the initial TCE spike. GOOD.

So, thus far I have been able to measure the degradation rate of TCE with various iron types and find k observed, k mass, and k surface area. I need to continue with the septa experiment along with my analysis.

Happy septa crimping!