Welcome to the NC State Center For Applied Aquatic Ecology!
Here are some machines that I learned how to use today as well as some important processes to remember:
Testing template for silica in water and seawater
High purity water machine
quAAtro machine flushing and stabilizing before analyzing [the quAAtro machine is also referred to as the Continuous-Flow Injection Auto-Analyzer] (see attached link below)
32 silica samples taken from falls lake for a student working on her PhD
Testing for total suspended solids from falls lake with labeled water samples and glass microfiber filters
quAAtro machine analyzing silica samples from falls lake (see attached link below)
d1v2
TSS filtering in process (see attached link below)
Data recorded from the filtering- includes filter paper number, filter paper weight in milligrams, volume of water added, and sample name. The filter and residue weight will be measured Thursday after the filter paper is dried in the oven at 104.1°C. The samples included 3 field duplicates usually meaning they were collected using the same collecting methods and for every ten samples, we did a lab duplicate to see if our filtering methods yielded consistent results. Gathering all the data from filtering took 3 hours, which did not include weighing 30 glass microfiber filters before which took another full hour!
These are the glass microfiber filters after filtering the lake samples