Chapter Seven: Dropping Flames All Over The Lab Game (feat. Melanie, Jeff, Jamie, Bryden, Sabrina, Chris Lamb, Alicia Vaughan, Heather Bigley, Fellow AP Researchers)

The lab got pretty hot this week, as it featured some major fire! No, I didn't drop my mixtape in the lab, though I bet if I had a mixtape, it would be straight heat. While the mixtape would have to have some rap for it to be fire, it would probably have some indie, classical, and jazz influences just because I probably wouldn't be able to put out a fully hip-hop/rap album that was actually good.

In all seriousness, this week, besides the usual Natural Analytical Standard trays, I got to run my water sample and the other water samples from hot springs through the Flame Atomic Absorption Machine! The machine essentially runs like so:

We first create standards to run through the machine for the same purpose that we run standards through the Ion Chromatography Machine: we create a calibration curve using known amounts of standards and then compare water samples to that curve.

The standards, all in different dilution amounts.

We then run the standards through the machine. The machine essentially shoots light coming from a bulb with filaments made out of different ions (sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, etc). The light reflects off of mirrors and passes through a sensor to give us a strength reading.

The light sources come from these bulbs - the red filament in the picture is made of sodium.

We turn on a flame that the light passes through and start siphoning different water samples in through a capillary tube. The ions in the water go into the composition of the flame. If we're running sodium as the light source, sodium in the water will go into the flame and will in turn interact with the strength of the light source passing through the flame, giving us different readings. As an added bonus, different materials create different-colored flames! Pretty cool, if you ask me.

This capillary tube will suck in water samples.

And different colors of flames will come out of it!

As a precaution for flames that emit dangerous amounts of UV light, we generally look at the flame through this UV filter on the front of the machine.

There was even a pink flame!

The results of the Flame AA tests.

So why do we do both the Ion Chromatography tests and the Flame AA tests? Well, good question! The IC tests look for concentrations of anions (fluoride, chlorine, phosphate, sulfate, nitrate, etc), whereas the Flame AA tests look for concentrations of cations (sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, etc). It really depends on what you want to find out about the water! For example, large levels of calcium will generally mean that there are large amounts of limestone runoff in the water source.

And what do these results mean? Hopefully, find out next week! I have the data showing the concentrations of cations and anions, but this next week, I plan on contacting a professor at NAU to help me interpret the data. If the data is interpreted in next week's post, you'll know that the professor was willing to help!

Besides the Flame AA tests and the NAS trays, I presented my research findings for my AP Research class! If it's allowed, I'll see about obtaining and posting that video on here. However, if you want to see that presentation mixed in with the rest of my internship, come see my SRP presentation and the rest of my classmates' presentations on Saturday, May 6th. The first presentation starts at 9 am; my presentation is last, at 4 pm.

Hope to see you next week!

End of Chapter Seven.