madscience_7

For the next 5 weeks or so I will be doing 2 labs each week, with some of them overlapping so that I will at times be working with 3 different groups. The first week wasn't bad. We didn't have a lab until Wednesday. But I got the short straw for the first lab. I got stuck with group leader, and I got the "phantom" in my group, meaning we only had 2 people instead of the usual 3. The first lab sucked. It was a study of compressible flow through various orifices. We had to collect data in order to analyze the performance of the orifices, calculate mass flow rates at the choke point for each orifice, and determine the speed of sound at the system conditions. The hardest part of unit ops is that there are no instructions. We get to look at the apparatus to see what is included and figure out how we are going to go about our objectives. Sometimes the apparatus has things we don't need and is missing things we do. Well, if we cant measure something, we have to figure out some bassackwards way to calculate it. We have to keep track of all of our assumptions though so that we can do an error propagation analysis on our data. The data for the compressible flow lab was pretty bad for 2 of the orifices. I'm pretty sure that was mainly due to bad locations for the pressure taps. The other orifice had better data. All of the data correlates well, even if it isn't accurate, so that is a good sign of systematic error, which we can account for in the report. Of course, my partner tore something in her knee yesterday so we didn't get our draft in before the deadline, so our first paper will have no review or input from any of the profs. Looks like thats going to be a shitty grade. The paper is a long format paper so there isn't a page limit, so I'll probably just put everything I can think of into the report to cover all of my bases.
The lab for today was a membrane separation of Nitrogen and Oxygen. This lab is an oral presentation so we barely even have 24 hours to analyze all of our data and put together a PowerPoint show for the profs tomorrow. I'm not the group leader on this one so I'm leaving it up to the leader to plan things. I'm happy getting C's on all of these, but I don't want to let my group down, so I'll do everything that is requested of me, but nothing more. Here's hoping...