Senior Project Week 3 & 4 (4/16-4/26)

I have combined the blog post for this week and last week because I was only able to go into the lab for 2 days last week because of travel plans. I started the week of the 16th by preparing 4 batches of droplets with different volume fractions: One batch had droplets diluted twice in the buffer, one four times, one six times, and one eight times. 

I kept the concentration of ferrofluid (the liquid that causes the droplets to align into chains under the magnet) constant, and over two days, cycled through heating the droplets, aligning them, cooling them, and removing the magnet to allow them to fold several times for each batch, while taking motion picture videos to allow me to gather data on the chains.

The next week, I maintained a similar experiment design, but this time varied the concentration of ferrofluid in the droplet solution, to observe how it affects chain formation and the average chain length of a sample.  For this process, I made sure to keep the amount of time I kept the droplets at each step constant so that I would have accurate results.

I heated the droplets to 50C for 5 minutes, aligned them at 50C for 5 minutes, cooled the droplets to room temperature under the magnet for 10 minutes, kept them under the magnet at room temperature for 7 minutes, and removed the magnet, allowing them to fold for 5 minutes, and took separate videos of each step. 

This phase of the experiment will continue on to next week, but so far, we have data on the average chain lengths at different ferrofluid concentrations that another member of the team was able to analyze, and I was able to present my findings at the weekly group meeting, so I am excited to see what other trends we begin to see as I repeat this process with varying concentrations.