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Shelly Wu, Week 4-5

I spent the last two weeks conducting 3 batches of hot-water extractions and testing total organic carbon concentrations on my soil samples.
After spending almost two weeks consolidating my protocol, I officially began working on the soil samples from the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory. Instead of 3 samples that I used in each of my practice trial, I have 12 samples per batch for 4 batches in total, which required much more time and attention. For my first and third batch of hot-water extractions, my data turned out well, and I could see some differences of TOC concentrations between surface and subsurface samples even though I only had half of the complete data. However, the same problem that happened in my practice trials occurred in my second batch—I got some negative numbers, which means that the TOC concentrations of certain samples are lower than that of distilled water. In order to fix this problem, Dr. Plante told me to rerun these samples after I finish all 4 batches to make sure that it’s only an extraction error. After testing TOC concentrations for my soil samples, I took the residues, dried them in an oven, and ground them for my next step, thermal analysis. I probably will not have enough time to conduct thermal analysis on all of my samples, but hopefully, I can do some of it, just to get an idea of what thermal analysis is like.

I have one more batch of hot-water extraction left, and I hope to see some more good results. Meanwhile, I am starting to analyze my data. I think the data analysis can give me more insight into the experiment as a whole.
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