Senior Project Week 5 (4/29-5/3)

Last week’s experiments found that changing the ferrofluid concentration had interesting effects on the rate at which the droplet chains began forming, so we decided to continue exploring that this week. 

During the entire week, I tested samples with ferrofluid diluted 4 and 8 times. Instead of only aligning the droplets for 5 minutes and then cooling and folding them, I kept the sample at 50C for a full hour. This way, I could determine if/when the droplets reached a steady state where they no longer formed chains. 

What we initially found by creating graphs with computer analysis of the images is that the samples with lower ferrofluid concentration formed chains at a slower rate than those with higher ferrofluid concentration. 

Performing these experiments to gather enough data will be what I am focusing on for the next couple of weeks, so these blog posts may not have as much content as the previous weeks, where I was still being introduced to the lab and was designing the experiments.