Today was finally the day when we could finally finish our project. Andrew had gotten the battery pack, as well as the resistors, so with that we were set. As we looked into the instructions, we figured that we would have to solder the positive wire to the right pin of the 3 pronged object that he got us, the resistor between the middle and left pin, and then the laser positive in the left pin, while connecting the remaining wires together to make the circuit.
Juan and I were ready to try our luck at soldering this time. As we worked on it, we found it being very difficult since I was worried of burning his fingers and I had very little space and bad angles to work with. AsI continued, we noticed the soldering wasn't very well done, so we burned it off and Juan tried instead, with not much more success than I. We had to remove that too and we tried a third time, where we found that it would have to suffice. However, once Juan and I put the two final wires together, to our great disappointment it just didn't work. Once we told Andrew even he was puzzled, I just had no idea why it wouldn't work. In the beginning, Andrew was saying that if the laser didn't work it was because of the diode, so I guess it could probably be dude to that but it was too late to turn back now. All in all, while the end was pretty anticlimactic, the process was pretty cool. At the very beginning of the class, we went straight to trying to get the solder out of the diode. However, getting it out would mean that we'd have to solder, which Juan and I hadn't done in years so we didn't have the expertise needed. Luckily, our friend Andrew was willing to help us out and with that he started to work on it. After a few minutes, he thought that the job would prove to be too difficult as the solder was too close to the diode and burning it off could possibly damage the diode itself, so we decided to abandon the idea completely. However, Andrew(teacher) got the diode and soon enough pried the solder straight off from the diode itself.
Now that that's over with, the next step is to gather a 6v battery, a resistor, and for us to connect the diode into the module of another laser that Andrew had brought in for us to use. Once we did that, there was nothing else we could really do except wait for Andrew to get the materials we needed for us to move on to the final steps. Today, we observed an experiment that was about this substance called sodium polyacrylate. Braden explained that this substance is special because it can absorb a non salty liquid up to 300-800 times it's weight. When I heard that I was amazed, how could this powder really absorb that much?! It was incredible, even though I had already had experience with the substance before. I had used it when my partners and I were trying to make hair gel, we used sodium polyacrylate but unfortunately, it didn't result well. We got that from diapers and, to prove our predictions right, Braden had gotten them from diapers as well.
He then put water into a container with just a bit of powder, and before we knew it, the fine powder all of a sudden turned into things that resembled gel clumps. When we asked why this happened, he said that the ions in it attracted the water and that the process is really quick, which I already knew since I had studied the substance before. What my table mates and I wanted to do is get some of the powder for ourselves to try and make gel again. So, we got a bunch of it and put water in it. As we had expected, it was very clumpy, not quite like gel. Then, we started to add more and more water to it out of lack of ideas and to our amazement, it felt a lot more like hair gel. We kept adding more however, and soon, our focus was more to just play around with the feeling of it rather than making the gel. We added food coloring to it, and played around with it for a bit more. Today we continued to try taking the laser diodes out of the disc drives. It proved very difficult as once we disassembled one thing the laser diode was still covered many other things, so we just had to keep pulling stuff apart. One problem we came across was that there were some screws that required some really small screwdrivers. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to find any screwdrivers that served our purposes, so we had to try our luck with a ruler instead.
After much persistence, we were finally able to get one of them out. In that disk drive we even found a focusing lense, which would serve us later on. Next we tried getting the other one out just to have a backup. Unfortunately, as we went on to take apart more and more of it, we found that there was no laser diode after all. With that figured out, we tried to go to the next step but we noticed that the diode still had solder on it. We were told that we couldn't continue working with that solder in the way, but class was over so we decided to move it until tomorrow. Juan and I for the past days have been thinking that we wanted to make a taser disguised as a pen. Unfortunately, Andrew said we weren't allowed to go forward with it because it wasn't allowed by the school. However, that wasn't too much of a problem for us as we had also previously been thinking about making a laser that could burn through things like cd cases, pop balloons, etc. To our surprise, Andrew even suggested it after he told us we couldn't do the pen.
After, he pulled up a website that had instructions on how to build the laser. With that, our first step was to find a dvd drive. The reason for this is because from here we could get a laser diode, which would be the main component for our laser. We spent the rest of class time trying to get it out of a brand new dvd player we found. While we tried getting that out, Andrew found us another disc drive, this time it was from an old mac. Disassembling it was really tough, so we didn't finish today. There's this little mini project called Time and Space where we look at average things in a different way, such as taking a close up of the moon or taking a time lapse of people walking in and out of class. What Juan and I decided to do was pop a balloon and take a slow motion shot of it popping with water inside of it. After, Juan thought it would be cool if we did it with oobleck inside, so we tried that as well.
With water, the video obviously turned out well. Before we did it, I predicted that the water would initially hold it's shape as a circle more or less, and eventually spread out. In the end, it turns out I was right. With the oobleck, I thought that once I popped the balloon, the oobleck itself would maintain it shape for a second or so before it all collapsed. However, it didn't work at all. We couldn't even get the balloon to pop. I think this happened because the balloon still had air in it with the oobleck, and the balloon itself wasn't filled very much, it was still very small. Even if we got a big enough balloon filled with oobleck, I don't think it would pop because the rapid force of us prodding the balloon wouldn't affect the oobleck, since oobleck turns solid when acted upon harshly. For our first project for this quarter, Juan and I decided that we wanted to put oobleck on a speaker and watch it dance. Our thought process was that we would come up with many little projects and in the end they would cover our needed amount of points. When we ran this by Andrew, he told us that the range of points we could each get was between 15 and 30. With that, we set to work.
The day after our proposal, we got a small speaker about 7in. by 4in. We decided not to get a huge speaker because of transportation issues, as well as the fact that we thought this size was sufficient for our needs. We then proceeded to make the oobleck, which we already knew how to do. Once our oobleck was ready, we put some plastic bags over the speaker, so that the speaker wouldn't get dirty. We went outside and put the speaker on full blast. The idea was that the oobleck, once put on the speaker, would jump up to the rhythm of the music. Our result was not the same. No matter what we tried, we couldn't get the oobleck to "dance". We poured it on before turning the music on, after turning it on, rounded it together with a spoon, churned it into a ball, simply nothing would work. I could attribute this to many possible factors. I suppose one reason could be that we didn't use a speaker big enough, so maybe the vibrations of our speaker weren't big enough. Another explanation I can find is that maybe we needed a speaker that had a rounded surface, so that the oobleck could fall to the center, rather than go all over the place like with what happened with ours. I think that when it does work, that it happens because when the speaker vibrates, it shoots the oobleck up and that fast abrupt motion causes it to take some sort of form while in the air. What we were trying to get today is called an essential oil. This is a natural oil gathered by a process called "distillation". The goal here is that we extract the essence of the orange peels in order to make a substance that we will put in our hair wax to give it scent.
Today, now that we had finally gotten the dry ice, we went on to rip tiny pieces out of the orange peels that we had gathered. After we had done that, we poured all the small peels into a black container where we would extract the oil from. To do that, we filled the remainder of the orange peel container with small chunks of dry ice. Then we input pressure into it until the amount of pressure reached 1000 PSI. Once we were finished with that, Andrew plugged in a blow dryer and he started putting hot air on the container where the dry ice and orange peels were in. I'm not quite sure why, but I assume the most logical reason would be in order to melt the essence that the dry ice and orange peels created to make it into the essential oil itself. He kept going at it for a good 15 minutes, until we finally got all of the essence trapped into a vial. After some final research, it turns out that I was sort of right. The heating did serve a purpose in the process, but heating it alone would not do the trick. The reason for the distillation was that the heat vaporizes the substance and it then goes to where it will be condensed, and ones it cools, it will become a liquid. and goes into the flask that we put under the bottle. After, it was a simple matter of repeating the process until we got all of the essence out. Next, we will make a new batch of the hair product, this time adding our newly crafted scent in it. |
Ricky's Chemistry BlogHere you will find all about the experiments we are doing in chemistry as well as the individual progress I am making. Archives
December 2015
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