During my 3rd day at RTI, I got to experience a lot of cool lab technologies. Firstly, Kiera and I worked to create WOW particles in the lab, which stands for “water in oil in water”, and are truly, wow. These particles have a core, which in this case was simply water and food dye, to see the particles better, and then they are encapsulated in a two-layer shell. This technology is used to create a shell around particles, and this particular project was used for delivering chemicals into oil wells that can withstand the harsh conditions of the well. A lot of this process we couldn’t really see, as it is done by UV curing, and UV rays are harmful to look at. However, at the end of this process we were left with what looked like thousands of microscopic beads at the bottom of a test tube. While initially this didn’t look very exciting, it was way cooler when viewed under a microscope. We could see that each of these beads were perfect circles, encapsulating 1 or a few little particles. We used a variety of food dye, just so we could see the slight differences.
The afternoon brought yet another amazing experience with microscopes. We visited the SEM microscope, which uses electrons as opposed to rays of light, and can see things smaller than 1 nanometer, or about 1/100,000 the width of a human hair! First, we had to coat various objects, which were foams created with tiny glass balls to decrease their density, in metal so that the microscope could pick up the textures. This was done by creating a plasma of argon gas in a vacuum around the objects, which glowed an amazing purple-pink. Then we got to see objects 20,000x zoomed in under the microscope. It was incredible to see the immense texture of objects that looked completely smooth to the naked eye.