This week certainly went by quickly.  One day this week I had the opportunity to place the bottlebrush polymer into a solution containing vinyl ether and a photo initiator. This is a pre-step before using the flow coater to cast the thin film polymer.  The  chemistry to make the solution was quite the refresher! Just goes to show if you don’t use some skills for a long time, they can get rusty! We then let the solution sit refrigerated until the next day.  Next we ran it through the flow coater.  I think I got better at using the flow coater machine this time around. Once the bottle brush polymer samples were cast onto the silica wafer,  then we took the polymer coated silica wafers to a UV reactor and put in the UV bulbs ourselves. You can change the intensity of the UV light by the different types of bulbs there. We used a radiometer to calculate the amount of UV in the machine and allowed it to stabilize before placing our samples created from the flow coater to set. My understanding is that the UV light will further crosslink the polymers. Now I have been spending the remainder of the week testing the thickness of all of the different wafers via the good ol’ faithful ellipsometer. Then they have been washed for 10 minutes and then thickness measured again to see how effectively they have been crosslinked.

On  a separate I would say the highlight of my week was getting to go on lab tours with the other NEWT RET’s here and getting to see some of the awesome things they are also doing in their labs. Happy Independence Day/Week etc. everyone! Getting better at the flow coater