Week 4 - Friday

Today was a short day, I left at 2:00-ish, so did the rest of the staff.

The plan for today was to blow down our practice samples in preparation to run them on the GC. It became apparent that only certain parts of the N2 blow-down module (similar in function to the Anderson Lab's turbo-vap) worked properly. I was able to confirm with the staff that it had only kind of work as of late. Even with the functioning parts i don't think the flow through the 1/8 copper supply tubing would be sufficient for several simultaneous samples. I took apart the blow-down module to inspect it and can understand why it doesn't work very well. There is a design flaw and is needs new parts from the manufacturer to work correctly. We set in motion an idea to construct our own blow-down apparatus and will finish setting it up and testing it on Monday.

The blow-down via the roto-vap and transfer of samples was performed by me first followed by Adama, Marie, and Viex. Anna was present, but did not do/practice the transfer.