Week #7 was troubling. Because of the hurricane that swept through Houston, I wasn’t able to be on campus for the first two days of the week, so I didn’t get to achieve much progress in the lab as I wanted to. The days I was here I spent as much time on campus as possible, since I still don’t have any power at home since Sunday night. So, I have been here in my cubicle/lab enjoying the AC but sometimes it does get too cold, and honestly, I’d prefer to be cold than to be at home with no AC.

The days I did spend in the lab, I continued to synthesize the third iteration of the electrocatalyst, Iridium Oxide. This time I did it without the supervision of my mentor, and I thought it was wise to confirm the measurements with my mentor. As of now, I am currently on step two out five for the synthesis process. Like I mentioned in my previous blog, this will be the third time that I am synthesizing the electrocatalyst. This time I will attempt to extract as much product as possible so I can apply this to the solar cell and assemble everything in the electrolyzer.

 

I have asked my mentor what other types of tests I could to on the electrocatalyst powder and so far, I have done XRD (X-ray diffraction) analysis (to measure crystallinity) and LSV (linear sweep voltammetry) to measure the current while the potential between the working electrode and a reference electrode is swept. We did try to use a normal good-old fashioned microscope, but we spent about an hour trying to see how it works, and we could not get any good images of the powder. I am not sure if

it’s because I don’t know how to operate the instrument or if it’s only useful with specific types of samples. I did ask my mentor for assistance, but she had not used one before as well. At the end of the week, I got to use a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and here is some of the images I collected from using that instrument. It was insane the level of magnification it possesed.

 

As of n0w, there are three weeks left, and I am excited to put together all the research I have collected for a final presentation.

 

– Adrian