Today was a fantastic day! I maintained a high energy level throughout the day. We worked together in an efficient and smooth way without having any conflict. We started our day by by cutting plastic bottles into small pieces (around 1 cm^2), and this was the part I put the most motivated today. It not only was interesting but also helped enhance our relationship. 1.5 grams of plastic were measured by an analytical balance and were put into 6 nearly identical beakers. We planed to do two 2-hour-trails which each trail contain 5 different temperatures: 25, 40, 55, 70, 85, and 100 degrees.
Using the “right” hotplates, 4 beakers were heated after the temperature stabilized. Finally, we measured the change in mass of the plastic by calculating the differences between the initial and final mass of them to analyze the changes.
However, we forgot to test the hotplate before starting the experiment, so unfortunately, we did not found 2 of them were broken until we heated water for 10 mins. This is the part I felt the least motivated because I was tired, discouraged, and even wanted to stop experiment at that time.
I could have persevered through these time because I was encouraged by the passion of team members and started the experiment with confident and hope again. Moreover, I reminded myself that this is a two days experiment, which meant we had enough time, so “do not feel frustrated about this little failure”.
During the heating process, I also did some researches in degradation of PET. I decided to analyze our results in three aspects: Negation of Hypothesis of Plasticizers or PVC, Influence of Acetaldehyde, and Ways to Alleviate the Degradation.
My goal for tomorrow is that elaborate my structure and make a detailed explanation of the chemical process. Also, we will start editing our final video and poster too. I hope we can finish them.
Sabrina's blog 