Hey friends, I hope everyone had a great time celebrating the red, white and blue! The holiday made for a short and easy week, however, the research updates for week five aren’t as exciting as it has been. Besides trying to stay updated with the FIFA World Cup, I did still get some preparations finished. On top of the normal preparation of researching background info, I was able to run an overnight flush that prepares a sampler for testing. Simply put, I run clean air over the sampler for an extended amount of time which serves two purposes. 1- It pushes off any impurities compared to the clean air. 2- once the clean air is on the sampler it will be used as a baseline when trying to detect our target analytes. After running the flush over the sampler, the next step was road blocked for, also, two reasons; my mentor was sick a couple days and the CIMS was filled ammonia. The chemical ionization mass spectrometer (CIMS) was filled with ammonia because of other experiments running and this would give a very unclear sampler reading. So, lets hope next week we can start making moves to get results.

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