Week 3 - Reading Up

This week, my mentor, primary investigator, and just about every other researcher in my lab was gone at a conference. This means that I have been mostly unable to perform any experiments, as nobody is around to help with troubleshooting the HPLC or to ensure we interns do not blow anything up. Instead of running additional experiments to attempt to explain our results from last week, I have been reading up on the literature and ensuring that I have a firm grasp of the theory behind our project.

On Monday and Tuesday, I reviewed two papers that had studied the kinetics of various amines reacting with MnO₂. By analyzing the data and fitting it to trends, I developed models that should allow us to predict the behavior of some of our amines of interest.

On Wednesday, I reviewed available literature to see if anyone had experience with aniline adsorption to MnO₂, in an attempt to understand my results from last Thursday, when the 4-chloroaniline disappeared from my reaction vessel too quickly to be measured. A few authors indicated that anilines do indeed adsorb to MnO₂ during the oxidation process, but also found this effect to be slow enough to be measured. So, it does not seem that quick adsorption is the reason behind our results. In any case, it will be interesting to run additional experiments next week to see if I can determine what exactly is happening in our reaction vials.

I spent most of Thursday and Friday doing background reading on the importance of my project and the mechanisms of the reaction of interest. Starting to work on the introduction to my final paper has made sure that I have a firm grasp of where we are in our research project, and what still needs to be done. Come next week, I will have a better idea of what needs to be done for our developing experiments, and should hopefully have a better theoretical basis to overcome future difficulties. I look forward to next week so I can put my newfound knowledge to use.