Burning Stuff

Wednesday 4/20

Iron is definitely my favorite nutrient to analyze. We started by weighing out triplicates of raw CSB samples into crucibles (little, white porcelain bowls). Unfortunately we don't have the type of furnace we need in our lab in Bevier so we were going to have to transport all 20ish samples to the Ag Engineering building across the south quad. This means we had to get creative with our packaging. We cut out slots in cardboard and placed it in a big white container. We put a crucible in each little slot and then drew a map in our lab notebook. You can't label the crucibles (it'll just burn off) so the map we drew as to which sample was which was very important. All CSB tends to look the same even though it's from different companies or different parts of the world.

The next part of our adventure involved trekking through some sweet underground tunnels. I never even knew there were tunnels connecting so many of the buildings underneath the quad and even underneath the streets! After reaching AESB, we climbed some stairs, found our lab and starting loading our samples into the furnace. Again we had to make a map in our notebook to make sure after everything got burned we would know which samples were which. After 18 hours of burning at over 500 degrees Celcius (that really hot!) we will be able to evaluate the iron content of the samples. The heat will destroy all of the CSB sample besides the metal in it (which is iron!). Even though this whole process took about 5 hours, it was a fun and adventurous day.