In the lab

Today I finally got to start doing some real research. Though not the most exciting part of my research or my stay in China for people to read about, I thought I would share the field notes I wrote up this afternoon. In other news, I also found out my Reading final test today, 92 out of 100! Yea for me. Makes me feel better about the other tests too, three more to go!

Field notes 1/23/2007. Calibration

Today Liao Wenjie, Jiang Laoshi’s graduate student who has been assigned to help me, took me to the lab to use the scale and calibrate my equipment. The lab was located in the Hydrological Engineering Building near the West Gate of campus. The room we used looked like many of the other lab rooms I have seen on campus, about 10’ x 20’, dirty, and cluttered with all sorts of glass wear, some containing mysterious brown solutions that looked like they had been sitting for weeks. The state of the laboratory rooms I think is representative of the quality of research that occurs. The dirtiness and disorder of the room would be unacceptable even for an undergraduate lab in the United States.

However, the room did contain a scale accurate to 0.0000g which I was very grateful to be able to use. The scale was small and had sliding glass doors. Inside the weighing chamber there was a small 100ml beaker containing what appeared to be salt crystals that were absorbing chemical ions in the air. The crystals were blue at the bottom of the beaker and reddish/pinkish the rest of the way up. I recorded the brand and any other data I could find about the scale in case it became useful. I also photographed it.

I began weighing the filter paper and placing each in a labeled carrying device. Since I only had 10 plastic carrying dishes, I put the 1^st trip Yangjuan and Juizhaigou weighed filter papers in them. After that I devised a scheme to layer the filters in the case they arrived in with the piece of paper that had separated them denoting the label of the filter directly beneath it.

I realize that this does not protect the filters as well as if I had cases for all of them, but I only had 10 cases and this is the best solution I could come up with given I had to weigh all the filters I will need now because I may not be able to use the lab again before my second research trip. I weighed and labeled all the filters I thought I would use, the blanks, and 8 extra just in case, about 50 filters in all.

I had also planned on calibrating the rotameters today and had brought them to the lab as well. Unfortunately, when I arrived Liao Wenjie informed me that there was no 1L titration burette, the largest they had was 50ml. I was very surprised to learn this because this is a very standard piece of glass wear, but I guess I should learn not to be surprised in China. I explained what I wanted to use it for and he said he understood the concept but had never done it before. I asked how people usually calibrated things like this at Sichuan University and he said he didn’t know; there was no air research going on. While I finished weighing my filters he thought about something else we could substitute. After a while he told me he had called a friend who had made a 1L/min calibration device but had never used it. Even though I wanted to calibrate at 10L/min, I thought if I could see the device maybe I could think of something. However, when the friend arrived he said that it was “corroded” and didn’t work.

So, I still have not calibrated my rotameters and pump and am leaving for Yangjuan and Xichang with Deborah and Matt on Saturday. As soon as we return from Yangjuan, around February 3^rd, I will take the bus to Juizhaigou to meet Andrew Scanlon and another woman named Dawn who will be accompanying me into the valley where I will do my research. They will be working on a garden project there. I plan on carrying out the experiments anyway, since I have weighed the filters and that is the most important part. I have emailed my advising professor back at UW about possible alternative methods for calibration. I also emailed Liao Wenjie about where Sichuan University buys their glass wear so perhaps I can purchase a 1L titration burette to use. Once I can find one, I will calibrate the equipment after all the data has been collected. Though not ideal, I will at least be able to back track and use a more exact flow rate for calculation.