well, the semester was a lot worse than I thought it'd be. I got very busy with work, then very depressed as a result of PChem II, which was statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. The lab broke me physically and mentally, and as I spiraled into a deep depression, memories faded and blurred. This synopsis is the highlights from everything from my junior spring, from after cleaning the GC-MS ion optics until the end of semester.
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early semester:
After cleaning the ion optics, I pumped down the vacuum and ran a systems check, and realized that the electron multiplier voltage had jumped nearly 300 volts. This was bad, because the EM has a serviceable voltage range from 1100 volts to 2600 volts, and by the time I finished maintenance, the voltage had jumped from 1871 volts to 2165 volts. This shortened the lifespan of the EM detector by a substantial margin.
I replaced the acetone keg. The department has a 55 gallon drum of ACS-grade acetone, and when it ran out it became my responsibility to replace it. Using a barrel jack, my boss and I got the drum off the pallet from the loading dock, and we jacked the 55 gallon drum off the pallet and got it upstairs, where we replaced the empty drum with a full one.
I also was tasked with the setup, troubleshooting and calibration of the lower division gas chromatographs. I set up and tested 7 GCs, and all of them ran smoothly, despite the trouble with some of the GCs and not being able to baseline resolve the peaks of the test samples.
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mid semester:
we had a bad snowstorm, which knocked out our prep day for Pchem II lab. The lab (Lab V) was a nitrogen spectroscopy lab where the light from a nitrogen discharge lamp was fed into a spectrometer which sorted the light into discrete peaks corresponding with specific molecular transitions. First the spectrometer was not calibrated, and then the results we got took well over 3 hours to process. Furthermore, the lab was gassed by a research lab weighing some thiol in the analytical balances in the lab. The results were so bad that the professor had to provide the lab data. Consequently, that lab was an unmitigated catastrophe. The spectrophotometer resolution was far too low to sort the frequencies out, and the data we got was unusable.
Lab VI went far better, I learned how to set up and calibrate the IR spectrometer, and it worked well. Our R2 was 0.9995, and was so good that my PI thought the data was fake when we showed our results to him. The writeup of lab V and VI was one of the worst writeups, I pulled a 72 hour all-nighter and suffered a mental breakdown, which spiraled into a deep depression afterwards.
Spring break was interesting, as I was tasked with recovering as many materials as possible from the physics department, and I recovered a ton of coaxial cables, as well as NMR amplifiers.
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Late semester:
At this point i had become severely depressed, and I was watching the weeks melt away. I think the only noteworthy things I did (besides continued GC-MS maintenance) was just vacuum pump repair and testing, and a last-minute oven swap for PChem Lab X. This setup was horrendous. There were 5 extension cords, and multiple variacs run on the same extension cord, as the placement of wall circuits was rather sub optimal.
Servicing the vacuum pumps taught me about capacitors and the difference between starting and running capacitors. The vacuum pumps require large capacitors as they were run capacitors, and the failing capacitors corresponded with a failing pump. The O-ring seals of the pumps were also going bad, so replacement was necessary. None of the pumps needed a replacement diaphragm, which was good.
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Summer:
I started my honors thesis, which is making a column chromatography apparatus with native UV-Vis visualization for the column fractions. Using Autodesk Fusion, I rapidly prototyped and printed column hardware. Unfortunately, I cracked the column when fitting one of the column fittings, so that was bad. I ordered a new column and now I need to develop a sealing lid for the column so that the column could be connected to an eluent reservoir.
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Retrospective:
I learned a lot, and did a lot, and despite how bad the semester went, I had a good time working as a technician as it gave me work experience and I found joy in the little things, like fixing and maintaining lab equipment.