Day 10

October 26, 2011

We didn't do too much today. The whole time we made polyacrylamide. I'm not exactly sure why we made it and what its purpose was but it came out as a gelatin. Kellin just guided me through each step. To make the gelatin, we mixed acrylamide with bisacrylamide. The acrylamide was 12.5% weight per volume. There were two different bisacrylamides. One was 1.3% bisacrylamide weight/volume. The other was 0.15% bisacrylamide weight/volume. The 1.3% would end up as a harder gelatin while the 0.15 would end up softer. Before we mixed the acrylamide and bisacrylamide, we had to create a solution with a 4 to 1 ratio of the substances in order for it to work. So we used 40ml of acrylamide and 10ml of bisacrylamide. Then we added 2ml of a chemical called Temed to each of the mixtures. Temed makes the reaction undergo. But for some reason, it smells very badly. It had a pungent stench that smelled like rotton fish. So we had to make sure to open and close the bottle very quickly! Then we added 5ml of 10% APS. We had to wait for about 10 minutes for the gelatin to form. After waiting, he took the gelatin out of the container and let me hold them. It was really cool because it felt exactly like jello. The hard gelatin formed perfectly, but the softer gelatin came out too soft. So then we tried the whole process again but making a larger amount of polyacrylamide. This time, the soft gelatin formed right, but the hard gelatin did not. Kellin realized that the problem may be that the acylamide might be too old. He made a new acrylomide, but we did not have enough time to perform the experiment again.