Trip to Kansas City

Haley in one of the fountains

Flame Sealing A Quartz Tube

Preparing the sample in the glove bag

The ESR Machine

The prepared/flame sealed quartz tubs

This week 4 of us made a trip to Liberty, MO which is very close to Kansas City. We were going to a college there, William Jewell to run a test on some of the glass that has been made at Coe this summer. We were looking at the Electron Spin Resonance spectra of diferent compositions, which will be analysed and give us a better understanding of the structure of these glasses. Some of the samples we had made react badly with water so they cannot be out in the air. They were made in the glove box at Cor to avoid this issue, but William Jewell does not have a glove box. They had to be transported in a desecator/vacuum which got to sit on my lap for the whole 4 hour 30 minute trip. Which sounds bad, but it meant I got the front seat :) We got there Wednesday evening and started work on Thursday. We had to prepare the sample in a glove bag which looks shockingly similar to a trash bag with built in gloves. We hd to grind up the glass and put it in tubes, which were then flame sealed to keep the air out. After they were sealed we ran them in the machine to get the spectra. After 2 days of this we had ran 28 samples for which we have a lot of data that now needs to be analyzed. Thursday evening after dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings we drove to Kansas City to walk around. We went to The Plaza. It was full of expensive shops and restaraunts and fountains. It was beautiful and we had great weather so that was quite a bit of fun. We made the trip back to Coe Friday afternoon. Above are some pictures of what we were doing at William Jewell. And I guess Monday is back to work on making glass and running more tests with the Raman Spectrometer.