Day 3&4: Weighing Madness and Chemical Reactions

Day 3: We came to see the JC1 presenting their innovation challenge presentations. After watching them, we felt the serious need to speed up our own work to reach the level of detail and presentation.I hope there wont be too much expectations from J2s.
There were definitely important learning points and judges' comments to pick up from the presentation.

Day 4:
Today was a productive and fulfilling day. A lot of the time was spent in the laboratory. In the morning, we were expecting to witness the disassembling of the batteries (assembled on day 2) but unfortunately (or rather fortunate for us) there was some problem with the glove box as the H2O concentration was higher than expected.

We are hopeless with these things

With the mentor troubleshooting the problem, we were tasked with our first job in the lab- weighing! We all unanimously agreed that weighing was harder than it our mentor made it look like on day 2; not only must you be meticulous and stable, you cannot be distracted easily if not your (trembling) hand may hit parts of the weighing scale and the chemicals will spill onto it. After struggling for 10 minutes to get near the exact weight, our mentor had to intervene and hit the elusive 16.000 mg in an instant (jaw dropping moment).
Later we saw how data is collected by testing several batteries.

Testing batteries

After lunch we resumed the brainstorming session for ideas for the innovation challenge (cannot discuss too much: top secret). We had a unexpected lab session in between where we weighed and mixed some chemicals to make FeS2 . We also visted other labs in MSE with equipments such as High temprature furnaces, Field emission scanning electon microscopy(FESEM) and others. Its amazing to watch these machines at work taking pictures of materials at nanoscale where you can actually see the atoms!.

X -Ray Diffractometer

Day 2 : Inside the glove box

After the introduction from the first day, things started moving pretty fast. On our second day the slurry of substances we weighed and mixed on the first day was ready to be used for the battery

Ms Shufen using the Glove box

Most of the action happened inside to glove box. This is because lithium metal used in the battery is highly reactive and cannot be exposed to atmosphere and thus a low oxygen and low moisture environment is required.














Do check out this video. The video is merged parts of a series of processes namely stacking the cathode,separator,anode,spacer,spring and sealing the battery.

Day 1: Intro to the Nanoworld

It is our first day of work! We had a short briefing today in the e studio and met out teacher mentors. As we enter the lab with all the lab coat and protective gear (safety first!),already feel like superhero scientist. Today we had an introduction to nanomaterials. What's so interesting about them? We learned that physical properties drastically change for the same material when it is on a nanoscale. For example most nanomaterial appear black despite having colour in macroscopic form. It would be really interesting to work with these things. In the lab, we got to experience the making of the anode of a coin battery using Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs), Tin Oxide and a polymer binder. The process is really meticulous and one must be really careful. Watch out for the next post where we put the whole battery together!