Hello,

This week has been very successful for me, and I am very thankful for that. Even though at the beginning of the week I assembled 4 battery cells that all short-circuited from the start, I came back the next day and made 4 more that all worked and 3 of them are currently being tested. As for the coin cells I made last week, they are also very successful in the testing so far. This should give me a great baseline of comparison between two cathode mixtures. I plan to start developing my own mixtures that might be useful for the lab. Being five weeks into this REU has taught me things I would have never thought about, even though I use batteries daily. It has also taught me how precise and careful you need to be in labs to get the desired results. Rushing through things, especially the assembly process, can ruin the days work I had put into that cell.

Since we are at the halfway point, I believe that I could possibly get more successful tests and data for my final comparison of all of the mixtures I have created. I had to go to Dallas this week to attend my cousin’s engagement party, so I finished all of my lab work on Wednesday and monitored the testing as well as analyzed the data remotely on Thursday and Friday. I am very excited to start working on my poster presentation, and I am thankful that I eventually understood my assignment even though it took many questions.