The "Good One" Club

Special Summer Series: Elizabeth Hoover de Galvez from the library's reference department, shares her observations of summer research at Coe. This summer she is working with Dr. Feller's materials science group.

It is inevitable that in a teaching lab, mistakes happen.  Students (and sometimes faculty) shatter, overheat, mislabel, and otherwise mess up.  As I started learning about the equipment in the physics lab, I sometimes felt paralyzed by all that could go wrong.  The way that the physics students handle these errors is with humor--by writing up a satirical account of the misdeed and posting in the halls of Peterson for all to see.  Then everyone can laugh about (and learn from) their mistakes together.    

Recent "good ones" (many of these may not be official "good ones" which get written up, but are just a few mistakes which have happened on the days I've been in the physics labs):

• a sample of glass was mailed off to another university; the researchers started getting unexpected results in their tests.  It was finally discovered that the students who had made, packaged, and sent the samples had mislabeled one of them.
• the scanning electron microscope was used to examine a sample which looked very strange under high-magnification.  After much head-scratching, it was discovered that the actual sample had been blown off of the viewing slide leaving only a highly magnified image of a piece of tape
• the small enclosed furnace room reeked of ammonia after students heated a glass which contained (I believe) ammonium powder of some form
• someone used highly flammable acetone cleaning solution in the furnace room
• while working with hydrochloric acid to clean crucibles, a student left the water running alongside an uncapped bottle of acid.  The students that arrived later found a puddle which they had to verify wasn't acid before cleaning up.
• the students also mentioned a couple of past accidents--melted platinum crucibles worth hundreds of dollars and equipment accidentally frozen by liquid nitrogen.   

When I first heard about the good one club, I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea; I am a fairly empathetic person and have been known to suffer from vicarious embarrassment.  But since learning that it is a somewhat formal/organized activity with support from faculty, I've decided that I'd prefer to have my mistakes broadcast openly with humor rather than whispered about.

Tellurium Glass--to England via Coe

Special Summer Series: Elizabeth Hoover de Galvez from the library's reference department, shares her observations of summer research at Coe. This summer she is working with Dr. Feller's materials science group.

At her poster session in the spring of 2015, Brittany Hauke told me that she had worked the previous summer to make a mere 2-3 grams of  tellurium glass.  She explained the baffling reasons behind the difficulty of making the glass.

The first meeting I attended with the materials science working group, Dr. Feller praised Brittany's accomplishment, saying that making this glass was extremely frustrating and required "surgeon's hands".

Over the last couple of weeks, I got to see Brittany and her lab partner Ariel Crego make and test several samples of the glass.  After two cycles of heating, roller quenching, and "mining" for pieces of glass, this was the glass they had managed to make:

Ariel Crego displays two vials of tellurium glass.  The glass on the right
turned yellow for an unknown reason, but it otherwise tested correctly. 

And here's a few steps in the process of making the glass:

First various powdered chemicals are mixed up according to precise calculations based on chemical weight.  They are melted together, reweighed to measure loss due to escaping gasses, and then reheated.  Finally, the molten glass is poured over the roller quencher, a piece of equipment which was invented right here at Coe.  The roller quencher cools the glass much more quickly than other methods.

In the videos first a run through the roller quenching, followed by

Brittany putting the molten glass in for a run through the roller quencher.

 The tedious process of picking through the flakes of crystal for any shards of glass.  I couldn't really see the difference, but apparently the crystal is more white.  Once the glass is out, they melt the crystal back down and run it through the roller quencher again.

They may reheat and run the same material through the roller quencher 4 or more times. 

Right now, Brittany is at the University of Nottingham in England working with researchers to do further testing on the glass.  One possible application for the glass may be in fiber optics. 

More of an Art--DSC of Lithium Borate and Cesium Borate Glass

Special Summer Series: Elizabeth Hoover de Galvez from the library's reference department, shares her observations of summer research at Coe. This summer she is working with Dr. Feller's materials science group.

Kristiana, Anthony, and Arron standing behind a differential scanning calorimeter.
They are collaborating on a glass research project this summer.

When Anthony DeCeanne told me about the work that his group is doing this week--measuring and calculating the change in Tg for over 40 samples of glass, I thought it sounded a bit tedious.  This "change in Tg" or ΔTg  (Delta Tg) is at the heart of a recent discovery made in Dr. Feller's lab.  Basically, the ΔTg for borate glasses with small amounts of added elements (Lithium, Sodium, Pottassium, and Cesium) have unexpected differences in ΔTg depending on which element is added to the boron to make the glass.

One of the first steps this group is taking is to go back through data collected by previous students and recalculate ΔTg for various forms of lithium- and cesium- borate glasses using a new method described by a meticulous Japanese scientist, Masao Kodama. 

I observed Anthony going through the process for several hours (as shown in the time-lapse video below) and realized that there is more to it than I first expected.  He looked at many DSC graphs from former years which didn't have the peaks and curves necessary to calculate the change in Tg and realized that the samples would need to be made again and retested.

The whole process isn't at all cut and dried --there are so many things that can go wrong in the process of getting a DSC reading which could skew the results.  Just one example is that the sample can crystallize within the chamber if a certain temperature is exceeded, which forces the students to start over and adjust the range of temperatures tested.  Below is Arron Potter preparing just one sample for testing in the DSC.

Materials Science: 2015 Summer Projects

Special Summer Series: Elizabeth Hoover de Galvez from the library's reference department, shares her observations of summer research at Coe. This summer she is working with Dr. Feller's materials science group.

The Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program kicked off this Monday at Coe with a total of 38 undergraduate students participating across seven working groups.  There is a mix of Coe students participating, from beginners to experienced researchers, along with students from other colleges and universities around the country.  I joined Dr. Feller's research group in materials science with 10 students and he and the students have been extremely welcoming and have allowed me to get hands-on experience with the lab equipment over the past couple of days.

For week 1, the students started with a deep cleaning of the lab.  On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Feller announced the projects that students can work on over the summer and gave his students an opportunity to choose which ones they may be interested in.

Of the eight projects available, at least four will include some collaboration with other universities around the world.  For example, three groups will be making samples of glass which will be shipped to other universities for further research and analysis.  One bonus of these collaborative projects is that students may eventually be invited to travel to these other sites; in fact, one student will be going to England for a second time this summer to work with the researchers who've been using the glass she's made.

Two of the projects are related to a new discovery which was recently made at Coe.  The discovery was an unexpected difference in the way in which two related glasses softened when heated.  Students will continue investigating the phenomenon and work to test a hypothesis which seeks to explain it.

One interesting new project this year will analyze elements present in pennies minted during WWII, particularly 1944 & 1945.  During the war copper was needed for the war effort and so the mint briefly made pennies from steel and then, in 1944, began reusing copper shell casings to make pennies.  Dr. Feller said this would be the first research to analyze and characterize the pennies from 1944 & 1945 to look for unique elements or distinguishing characteristics within the pennies.  They won't have to destroy the pennies to analyze the elements--they'll use the chemistry departments new XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) spectrometer gun, which provides a readout of all elements, including trace elements, present in an object.

Summer Research at Coe

Special Summer Series: Elizabeth Hoover de Galvez from the library's reference department, shares her observations of summer research at Coe. This summer she is working with Dr. Feller's materials science group.

It is May 12.  Spring classes and commencement have passed and May term is about to start. The library looks very empty, not only due to fewer students, but also because the artwork throughout the library has been taken down in preparation for the library renovation, which will get underway soon.

This will be my first full summer on campus and I am looking forward to learning about all of the research that happens at Coe during the break from classes.  The summer research program which I've heard the most about at Coe is the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, funded by the National Science Foundation. I've been browsing the national REU website, and it looks like Coe is unique as one of only four institutions in Iowa to host REU students (alongside the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa).

Coe has seven REU projects which undergraduates from around the country can apply to spend their summer working on:

• Acoustics of free reed instruments: J Cottingham
• Biochemistry of sea worm cement: M Dean
• Experimental and computational materials science: S Singleton
• Materials Science: S Feller
• Molecular Biology: P Storer
• Particle Detector Development: U. Akgun
• Optics: M Affatigato

Last summer, I began working at Coe in time to attend the final presentations given by the REU students and was surprised by what I heard.  I never would have guessed that musicians might study how a drum vibrates depending on where the surface is hit or that physicists would be involved in the creation of glass.  So far as I can recall, my physics classes in high school and college didn't cover current research, instead focusing on equations and laws written up in textbooks.  

One of the things I am most excited about at Coe is that undergrads are encouraged to participate in research during the summer after freshman year or even earlier.  This summer, I hope to be able to get into the labs to observe first-hand the work being done and to get to know some of the students doing research at Coe.