After many days of taking measurements and reading articles, today is the day for work. I was tasked with creating a fresh reactor by following the steps a previous student had detailed in her thesis (a process she had adopted from a different article). We had all the necessary materials, containers, and devices to create this catalyst, we only needed the time. Yesterday we started the process by calcinating a sample of ~200mg of zirconium oxide which would be our base for about 4 hours (we heated it up at 400 degrees C for 4 hours). Today I started by calculating the amount of Ruthenium Chloride Hydrate needed to add to the base. This was tricky. We wanted a final catalyst mixture that had 4% of the weight being consisted of pure ruthenium. We did not add pure ruthenium. I had to determine how much of the salt to add to get a hypothetical return of 4%. After being stuck in the lab for months, the zirconium oxide had acquired some moisture and lost a lot of mass after being calcinated, which means the calculation wasn’t made with the original 200mg but with ~120mg of zirconium oxide. After dissolving the salt into water, mixing, adding the base, mixing, and filtering for a solid half an hour (almost 15 runs through a quartz glass filter) I had distilled a solid nanoparticle catalyst. This was then stuffed into a glass tube between two packages of quartz glass fiber and, voila! We have a brand new reactor, ready to be tested tomorrow.
