Week 8 - Reasonable Results

On Monday, I created fits for my various plots of 4-chloroaniline experiments, and compared them to the literature values we have been studying. While there is a bit of variation in the reaction constants between our replicates, overall the data fits well with what is represented in the literature. This is exciting news, and means we can move forward in our project.

On Tuesday, I performed experiments with a new compound, 4-nitroaniline. This compound reacted much slower than 4-chloroaniline, and our results mostly just showed noise. We determined that we would have to perform experiments over a much longer time frame to get meaningful data for 4-nitroaniline.

On Wednesday, we took a field trip to Astoria to visit the CMOP center there. We were able to join researchers on a river vessel while they went out to a data collection buoy for maintenance. This was an exciting adventure, and convinced me that having a boat is a great job benefit.

On Thursday, I performed experiments with 4-nitroaniline and 2-methoxy-5-nitroaniline. The results were again not too conclusive, but I did determine that both compounds interact strongly with our filters, and so future experiments need to be quenched with ascorbic acid rather than with filters.

On Friday, I performed additional experiments with 2-methoxy-5-nitroaniline, and ran a 4-nitroaniline experiment all the way out to 5 hours. Even at 5 hours, 4-nitroaniline showed no significant decrease in concentration, meaning either the reaction is incredibly slow, or does not occur at all. 2-methoxy-5-nitroaniline was more cooperative, and I was able to narrow down the reaction rate and find a reasonable range of times to perform the reaction.