Weekly Meeting - Meet the Freshman Faculty

This week's meeting will be focused on discuss with faculty from the sciences and math, to learn what are their expectations of freshman and how to help prepare them.

Invited attendees are:
Patricia Ralston - Engineering Fundamental
Christine Rich - Chemistry
Thomas Riedel - Math
William Huston - Physics

See you at 10am Thursday July 7

Spray Drying

It has been very interesting to see a couple different ways that technology can break things apart into nano sized particles. I have been using a spray dryer to make nano-sized particles. So far we have been getting sizes in the 200nm-500nm range, which is pretty exciting. It has been interesting because we are working with different mixtures and trying to determine which of our variables minimizes the particle size while at the same time creating a uniformly spherical particle. At the moment we are going through a Taguchi model, which allows us to test the different variables, without changing one at a time.

I am planning on using this program in my classroom called imagej. You can kind of see the tool bar that allows you to measure different things about your particles. Hopefully, you all can use this tool too. I am going to use it to get some measurements so that my students can collect their own data instead of me giving it to them. Also, I wanted to use this image, because the particle in the middle is clearly huge compared to the others. This in theory came through a spray head that is only 4 microns in size, which cannot be true. I want to talk with the students about what happened to make that particle and see what the students can come up with.

This has been a great experience so far. Hopefully everyone else is enjoying it too.