Week 11: The VSM Saga—A Sticky Situation
Makeen S -
I: Glorious Glue
Hi everyone! This week, our main goal was finding a proper high-temperature adhesive for the VSM machine’s magnetic measurement. I found some good glues online, but ultimately went with rehydrating our old ceramic adhesive before buying anything. I crushed the dried up glue pellet into dust and mixed it with distilled water to make a paste and then left it to dry on the VSM’s quartz rods overnight. After a good bit of trial and error with drying and rehydrating, we finally had a good adhesive for high temperatures.
The glue workstation + quartz rods
Thursday, with a quartz rod glued and dried the night prior, Brecken supervised me on the VSM. This is where we ran into another roadblock. The VSM’s temperature limit is 1000°K (726°C), and our material did not exhibit a magnetic transition at that temperature range. Fortunately, I spoke with Ali about it and he gave me some resources and equations to help me calculate an approximate Curie temperature with the data we collected so far. The math is a little confusing, but I think I’ll have it together by Monday.
II: Solid-State Synthesis
Recalling from last week, we experimented with using a solid state reaction without arc-melting for synthesis and had that running in the furnace. However, we ended up with a significant amount of unreacted molybdenum as well as some iron. What this means is that our current best method of fully combining all elements is a thorough arc-melting (with flipping and cutting in half between sessions), and then pressing a pellet for an additional solid state reaction. I hypothesize that the intense heat of the arc-melter and the liquefaction of the metals is needed to help them fully combine, although the arc-melter does present difficulties with mass losses, excessive liquefaction, and issues using certain elements.
III: Group Meetings
This week we had some progress updates and a presentation by Emily on the glovebox. Next week I will be giving a presentation on the VSM, since I am the most familiar with that machine in the group. I’ll definitely have to do some more reading up on the specs of the VSM, but this is definitely an exciting opportunity!
Group meeting
IV: Outro
Coming up on our final blog post next week, its definitely going to be a big change to not be thinking about blogging anymore (I’ll miss all my loyal readers 🥲), but I’m glad I got the chance to share so much of my project with you all! Thanks for reading, and I will see you again next week!
Lab decor + post lab 300mg of caffeine
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