Wishful Thinking about Past Research

This year, I started with next to no prior experience in the field of research. I have made incredible progress in learning how to perform research, but now I can't help but wonder what I could've done better or different. It took me a while to understand how and when to use a lab notebook, which caused me immense delays. I had problems with time management, because I hadn't figured out how much effort I had to put in to various tasks. Probably the worst of all, I didn't know how to talk to experienced researchers. If I had known how to talk to a professional researcher, I could have shaved months off my project, but I was too nervous to initiate conversation. All these things would have made my life easier and my research better, but I guess I will just have to keep moving forward. After all, the stress of research were what made my progress so rapid.

The Science Fair Scramble

Well, it has been a while since I made a post, but I have been productive in science fairs. In a regional science fair, I ended up receiving 3 first place awards, so I felt rather confident as to my future success. It was too soon, however, as the next fair ended with not even an honorable mention. From the successes and failures of my science fair experiences, I have learned how to perform my research much better. Ever since my first science fair this year, I gained criticism after criticism, but they always just gave me a place to expand. I added on more stages to my research after I was told that I should keep progressing, but I also added more statistics when I was told that my data was insufficient. All the failure has spawned success, so I can't feel too bad about the science fairs no matter what I had.

PJAS Preparation

It's the middle of the average school year and most researchers have spent their time well, having spaced out their work in ways sufficient to have produced results. I am not one of those researchers. To prepare for the PJAS science fair, I have made a presentation that is being revised at the moment. There is but one problem: data. I have not reached the end of my experiment as of yet, with days of work left to be done before I will be, but I am running out of time. The deadline for me to turn in my presentation to PJAS is in about 10 days. That is more or less a frightening prospect for me, but I am going to be trying my best to get some results before then. That means I must work everyday, not to mention cutting corners. It won't be pretty or remotely ideal, but it will get the job done. It only makes me wish that I knew what I was getting myself into before I decided that this was not priority one. Maybe then I would have more time to work on this experiment. Sorry for this blog post being a little sloppy, but I am trying to prevent any of my classes from falling behind because I'm only focusing on one subject. Wish me luck, and I'll update when I can.

Status: Ecstatic but Enervated

Batch 2 undergoing pretreatment.
The Phragmites has a darker color than the
Bamboo, both in liquid and solid content.

My research could be going worse. I have very little to show as of yet for my first batch, but I have started a second batch for more data.

The second batch consists of six falconer tubes: 3 for Phragmites and 3 for Bamboo. Each sample consists of ground up stem/shoot material from either plant in a quantity of 1 gram with 25 mL of water.

I started the pretreatment phase last week and decided to take my time in it. This turned out to be a good idea, as I'm already getting promising data. My biggest success was finding information that points towards my present hypothesis to be correct. The hypothesis is that the structural strength of a plant will be affected by cellulose proportionally. I will try to prove this by showing that Bamboo should be better than Phragmites because it is a stronger plant, so it should have more structural fibers that can be enzymatically hydrolyzed.

In contrast to the initial success of promising results, I am getting close to my first science fair, not to mention my midterms, and I have little in quantity that can be presented. I hoped to have been able to set up my first batch to distill, but that hasn't worked out thus far. I'm being pressed for time by the science fair and feel the pressure already. I hope that I can get enough information to be able to present this Friday for my peers.

The big question at this point is whether or not I will be able to make ends meet and have a full presentation ready by the end of this week. I think I will be able to make it work with glucose measurements, but I'm not sure. Either way, big things are coming this way, so I need to be prepared.

Nearly Time to Collect Data

As the first phase of my experiment is almost done, I have needed to think about the kind of data I need to collect. At the moment, I've been collecting ethanol and glucose tests for a little bit to identify the stage of the processes going on. In the future though, I will need to collect data on energy potential, which is a lot more complicated than what I've done thus far. To identify energy potential, I will need to combust my test samples under water and track the temperature rise with some kind of instrument. From the temperature rise, I can determine what the energy content of my test sample is. All in all, not that complicated when described in this fashion, but it requires me to perform mathematics endemic to thermodynamics. In other words, I have no experience with what I will be trying to test. As I am currently sick with a head cold, I will be posting this on Saturday instead of Sunday like I usually do.

Research Update

A beaker of water forms a hot water bath for my samples during enzymatic hydrolysis.

These last few weeks I have been preparing to perform my experiment and then actually going through with it.

Thus far, I have been highly successful in performing measurements to keep track of the sample's progress. The only negative aspect of these measurements is that I run through my digital glucose strips ridiculously fast.

While some times have been successful, I have not been lucky in the time aspect. The process of making Cellulosic Ethanol has taken days of constant activity to get to this point, but it will be worth the wait.

During this update, you will see the picture of the test samples in the top right, but why is that one sample so darkly colored? This question has boggled my mind. I have ruled out that it was a high glucose concentration, but I still don't know what causes it.

I will finish my first batch of ethanol by Tuesday at the quickest, but I still have a whole other batch to make using Phragmites reed.

Food, Fuel, or Compromise.

Food or Fuel?

When people think about biofuels, they seem to imagine ethanol from corn being used in a politician’s luxury automobile, while they apologize halfheartedly to a starving third world nation. This is called the Food versus Fuel debate. The Food versus Fuel debate is weighing the options of using the U.S.'s bountiful corn crops to fight global hunger, or to use it to make ethanol fuel. While both sides have their delightfully biased opinions, they’re both terribly misinformed in most cases. The part everybody misses is that ethanol doesn’t only come from Corn.

Corn is a starchy feedstock, providing large quantities of ethanol for low cost, but it is also a staple human food item, thus making it expensive. Cellulose is a polymer of glucose and is present in many plants as a structural fiber. Cellulosic biomass makes up 95% of the Earth’s biomass, representing an abundant resource unusable for human consumption. To make a fuel, Cellulose can be broken down into glucose, which can then be consumed by yeast to make ethanol. That forms a compromise for both sides of the debate, but why don’t we pursue cellulosic ethanol already if this is the case?

The only way to make the compromise between food and fuel is to develop cost-effective methods of producing cellulosic ethanol. But what price is too much when the subject is solving both global hunger and alternative fuels?

Brown, Lester R. "Cars and People Compete for Grain - The Permaculture Research Institute." The Permaculture Research Institute Cars and People Compete for Grain Comments. The Permaculture Research Institute, 02 June 2010. Web. 26 Dec. 2015. <http://permaculturenews.org/2010/06/02/cars-and-people-compete-for-grain/>.

Research Purpose

There's always a method to the madness, or in this case, a purpose for the research. My research relates to the problem of alternative energy, as biofuel is currently an expanding industry, but companies mainly shy away from the ample supply of cellulosic resources in favor of starchy and sugary feedstocks. These feedstocks are definitely abundant, but only because they are also consumed by humans. For this reason, I find that using cellulosic feedstocks would be a solution for not only the alternative energy demand, but to spare food for the human population. I myself will be using invasive species of tall grass that are present in Philadelphia, which will face the issue of invasive plants as well as provide a supply of cellulosic biomass for ethanol. Because so much of the Earth's biomass is cellulosic, it is tremendous in it's potential for utilization, giving little reason not to tap this diamond in the rough.

References

Onuki S, Koziel K A, van Leeuwen J, et al. Ethanol production, purification, and análisis techniques: a review. ASABE, paper No. 085136, Providence, RI. 2008. 

Vaičekonytė, R., Kiviat, E., Nsenga, F. & Ostfeld, A. (2014) An exploration of common reed (Phragmites australis) bioenergy potential in North America. Mires and Peat, 13(12), 1–9.

Research Update

A piece of grinded bamboo under the microscope.

With Winter break coming, I have a long lapse in progress ahead of me. But before that, I've been doing research and will still be doing research. As of recently, I have:

A Success
I have just about all the equipment I need to begin making Ethanol and am now waiting on the remainder to arrive via the mail.

A Challenge
When I receive the equipment, I will be able to start, but I still have to figure out how to measure the properties of my ethanol.

A Question
How much time will each step in making ethanol take?

Research Plan

• Rationale
• In a busy urban city such as Philadelphia, there is a need for transportation; in the whole of the world, there is a need for renewable energy. On the sidelines, invasive plants overrun native ones, with new laws being made to curb new plantings. While making a biofuel from the invasive plants to knock out two issues with one solution, I will be investigating whether the pollution of the urban lifestyle will taint the plants too much to use in fuel.
• Hypothesis
• Research suggests that the plants picked for this experiment will absorb metals, making the probability for metal contaminants to be present in ethanol to be high.
• Research Question(s)
• Will there be any serious heavy metals in the plants?
• Will the contaminants interact strangely with the heavy metals?
• How will any contaminants change the reactions during different steps of the processes?
• Will I succeed at making ethanol, or will it just be moonshine?
• Engineering Goal(s)
• To determine whether urban grown plants are usable in biofuel, or whether they’re too polluted to be safely utilized.
• Expected Outcomes
• Likely to botch at least one batch of ethanol, which brings the necessity of a pilot experiment.
• Potential for unpredicted chemical interactions if metal contaminants are included in reactions.
• Plants are likely to be difficult to cultivate indoors, so surveillance will be a necessity to prevent plants from dying.
• Bibliography
• Littlewood J, Wang L, Turnbull C, Murphy RJ: Techno-economic potential of bioethanol from bamboo in China. Biotechnol Biofuels 2013, 6:173.
• Vaičekonytė, R., Kiviat, E., Nsenga, F. & Ostfeld, A. (2014) An exploration of common reed (Phragmites australis) bioenergy potential in North America. Mires and Peat, 13(12), 1–9.
• Yi Zheng, Zhongli Pan, Ruihong Zhang. Overview of biomass pretreatment for cellulosic ethanol production. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2009; 2(3): 51
• Onuki S, Koziel K A, van Leeuwen J, et al. Ethanol production, purification, and análisis techniques: a review. ASABE, paper No. 085136, Providence, RI. 2008.
• Al-mhanna, Najah, & Holger Huebner. "Quantification of Full Range Ethanol Concentrations by using pH Sensor."International Journal of Chemistry [Online], 3.1 (2011): p47. Web. 3 Nov. 2015
• Li, Zhiqiang, Zehui Jiang, Benhua Fei, Xing'e Liu, & Yan Yu. "BIOCONVERSION OF BAMBOO TO BIOETHANOL USING THE TWO-STAGE ORGANOSOLV AND ALKALI PRETREATMENT." BioResources [Online], 7.4 (2012): 5691-5699. Web. 8 Nov. 2015

Like a Cellulosic Cake

Lately, I’ve been reading up on the processes and procedures that go into making a bioethanol. 

A very interesting part of the procedure is the initial process, called the pretreatment. The pretreatment is the step that begins the process of breaking down cellulosic biomass by using a chemical solution of  an acid or alkali. After using the chemical solution on the feedstock, you wash it with water and treat it with a number of other solutions. I haven’t done this process yet, but I am apprehensive due to the likelihood that I will be handling a caustic substance with little between me and it. 

The pretreatment fits into my work by kicking off the process of making bioethanol, where it dissolves the feedstock into a substrate to be digested by enzymes and fermented by microorganisms. There are many steps to making a bioethanol, but the process is comparable to a recipe once written out in detail. All you need is the ingredients and equipment, and then you can rinse and repeat.

Progressing Progressively

In the photo, I am starting a new entry for my research.

These past few weeks, I’ve been solidifying my research background information into a solid foundation for an experiment. I had been rushing myself too much in my research previously, resulting in a sparsely ordered amount of background information and constant slowdowns. As of such, I’m now performing research in a far more efficient manner than previous, as my research template is visible on the left screen in the photo.

 One of my recent successes was developing and enacting the research template itself, as it demolished any worries about super slow and mind-numbing research, as well as speeding up my general progress immensely.

A challenge that has come up would be that I don’t exactly know the straightforward processes for making Cellulosic Bioethanol, seeing how many researchers perform different processes with additional steps at their own leisure.

A question I have would be “How do you take a cellulosic biomass and turn it into a feedstock?” This is a very crucial question, as a multitude of papers I have read left out the process they used for this important step.

All in all a very progressive couple of weeks, and I can’t help but look forward to my next blog post.

Probably wouldn't fit on a tool belt

 As I move into true scientific research, the question of what equipment will I be using for an experiment has come up. As I am lacking a trained mentor and unpaid internship, I simply do not know all of the equipment necessary for bioethanol production, but here's what I do know.

• High Tech
• Chromatograph (For high performance liquid chromatography or gas chromatography)
• pH Sensor (A high tech alternative to testing strips, with variations for more than just pH)
• Computer (For research, analysis, recording and publication)
• Centrifuge (To separate ethanol from impurities or by-products)
• Distiller (To actually begin the process of creating Bioethanol)
• Grinder (To grind a biomass into a feedstock)
• Filter (To separate feedstock from irrelevant materials and wastes)
• Mass spectrometer (For use in conjunction with chromatography for Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry)
• Bioreactor (Where fermentation takes place)
• Low Tech
• Glassware (Easiest to sanitize and reuse)
• Chemical Testing Strips (Nitrogen, Copper, pH, etc.)
• Chemicals (For use as a solvent and more)
• Enzymes (For enzymatic methods of bioethanol production)

 Not a very big list, but looking into each one will provide additional options and alternatives, while also providing me with much more information to use in planning my research.

Informational Reading: Fun not Included

Vaičekonytė, R., E. Kiviat, F. Nsenga, and A. Ostfeld. "An Exploration of Common Reed (Phragmites Australis)." Mires and Pea 13 (2014): 1-9. Web. 8 Oct. 2015.

Everybody likes to do casual reading, me included. Nowadays, my reading is mostly complicated papers using words I swear came from the SAT vocabulary section. My most recent reading project was a paper on the bioenergy potential of common reed (Phragmites australis) in North America.

My primary goal for reading this paper was to learn about the place of Phragmites australis in the bioenergy industry. To acomplish this goal, I focused on the summary, introduction, and discussion because they contained various informative details that would not have been found in the methods or results section of the article.

I knew a handful of the words that were used in the paper, such as Biomass, Feedstock, Net Primary Productivity, Bioenergy, Biofuel, Cellulose, Rhizome Segments. On the contrary, I did not know the words Lignocellulose, Old World Haplotype M, Opined, Culms, Capitalisation, Photosynthetic Efficiency, Forb, Leguminous Vine, Vegetative Propagules, Native Biota, Reed Genets.

The major parts of information from the article can be summed up as the following points:

• Phragmites has been spreading rapidly, which reduces biodiversity, and summarily prompted action to be taken towards it’s removal.
• Utilizing Phragmites might put economic pressure into expanding its population, summarily decreasing biodiversity at various locations.
• There is a potential correlation between the traits that make a plant a good bioenergy crop and the traits that make a plant highly invasive.
• The major conflict with utilizing reed as a biomass crop is the evident problem with increasing biodiversity, but reducing biomass production, and vice versa.
• The levels of heavy metals and major elements in reed depend on the geochemical environment, pollution of the water and soil in which the reeds grew, and the season.
• Reeds are known to accumulate contaminants including selenium, mercury, copper, zinc, cadmium, chromium, iron, and lead.

All in all, low concentration of fun, high concentration of interesting; quite the useful article.

Getting to Know the Predecessors of Biofuels

Over the years, research has been done by groups of scientists and engineers into the viability of biofuels, but the origin of the biofuel is a long and mechanical one.

•  Samuel Morey
• Career Path: Mechanics and Chemistry
•  Research Philosophy: Positivism
• Significant Invention: The First Internal Combustion Engine
• Relation to Interest: Morey’s engine ran on a combination of alcohol and turpentine; a precursor to later ethanol fuels.
• Legacy: While Samuel Morey never got the spotlight he hoped for, he stands out for having made a biofuel long before the term even existed.
•  Nikolaus Otto
• Career Path: Engineer
•  Research Philosophy: Positivism
• Significant Invention: The First Commercially Practical Four-Stroke Internal Combustion Engine
• Relation to Interest: The Otto engine utilized the easily obtainable and untaxed alcohol used in spirit lamps in Europe, making the engine run near purely on ethanol.
• Legacy: Nikolaus Otto developed an engine that could run on ethanol. In modern times, that would have been incredible if it was able to compete with other engines and still use this combination of materials.
• Henry Ford
• Career Path: Machinist
• Research Philosophy: Positivism
• Significant Invention: The Ford Model T Automobile
• Relation to Interest: The Model T was developed as the first flexible fuel automobile, as it could run on many different substances, including ethanol.
• Legacy: Henry Ford built for the sake of building, and his flexible fuel automobile was ahead of its time. He would have loved to know that he was ahead of the race for alternative fuels

The modern biofuel is a complex problem, with plenty of cracks for scientists to peer into and determine where they can improve.

No Hypotheses without Questions

 No scientist could follow the scientific method if they didn't know how to ask questions! That's one of the most vital parts! I have a heap of questions of my own that I will hopefully get an answer to one day!

1. How long does it take to make bio-ethanol?
2. What is the smallest viable quantity of bio-ethanol that can be produced?
3. What do I need to make a bio-ethanol still?
4. How long would it take to make a bio-ethanol still?
5. Does cellulosic feedstock have any significant difference from corn feedstock?
6. What precautions are taken in bio-ethanol production?
7. How do scientists take chemical analyses?
8. How formal is a lab notebook supposed to be?
9. Is it better to research independently or in a group?
10. Why does bio-ethanol turn into moonshine if the process is imperfect?
11. How small does something need to be grinded to become cellulosic feedstock?
12. How much is too much information?
13. How long does an experiment usually last?
14. Is a lab needed to make a good experiment?
15. How much of an experiment should be original?
16. How do you know if your experiment is actually good?
17. What if the experiment turns up nothing?
18. Does an experiment need to be repeated to confirm it's validity?
19. Can an experiment be altered based on newly revealed knowledge?
20. What kind of safety equipment is recommended for chemicals?
21. What kind of dangers are associated with chemicals?
22. How hard is an air analysis?
23. Can you swap high tech equipment for homemade or lower quality equipment?
24. Should an experiment with any form of danger associated with it be conducted alone?
25. How much of a process should be understandable to exceed at it?
26. When should an experiment be considered to be going nowhere?
27. How can you tell if your experiment is making zero progress?
28. Is a material best obtained in it's naturally occurring environment?
29. How does a soil analysis get completed?
30. How is concentration of a substance determined?
31. How often should you check up on your experiment?
32. Do you include redundant data as filler for a lab notebook or report?
33. Should you cut corners if you're running low on time?
34. What is acceptable in terms of cutting corners?
35. How do you choose your test material to ensure originality?
36. Is originality the aim if there is very little difference from a past experiment?
37. Is checking the validity of an experiment a worthy goal?
38. Is research experience better than lab experience?
39. When does it become apparent that high tech equipment is needed?
40. Should an experiment involving naturally occurring materials use lab produced versions on the side?
41. Is a control group always necessary?
42. How many different batches of test groups should be used?
43. How do you preserve a control group without snuffing it out?
44. How do you isolate a test group without ruining it?
45. What is considered a valid test group that is sufficiently different than the control group?
46. Does a sample need to be preserved from each group?
47. Should there always be another batch at the ready?
48. What is the chance of a batch being faulty?
49. What is the effect of a batch being faulty?
50. Why does a research question have to be so much more than just a question?

 I thought I had a lot of questions, but this is just nuts! I figure that by the end of my research, at least 30 of these 50 questions will be answered. No matter! There is only one truly important question that must be answered, and that is my research question!

Organized Chaos, a Praise to the Beauty of the Lab Notebook

 As a student with hopes and dreams of research, I am required to make a lab notebook. Now, I'm not exactly in a lab just yet, so for an example of a good lab notebook, I just used google images to get a random example.

 In this picture, you will see an illustrated jumble of information. To any experienced researcher, they will note the words used with the illustrations detail the exact occurrences and processes that went into their experiment. This is shown by the labeling of vital components and words that describe the thoughts of the writer.

 I can certainly take a few tips from this lab notebook, as I am new to the idea of actually having a lab notebook. One such lesson is how chaotic things may actually be in the notebook. I always pictured in my mind, that a lab notebook was supposed to be super neat and orderly, but here you can see that is definitely not true. In fact, this is easier to read than any of my textbooks!

 It just makes me feel more confident in the fact that I don't need to be unnecessarily neat to be very well organized. My head is like a massive debate, with tons of thoughts flying all over the place, so to have the freedom that comes with seeing this notebook, I am sure that I can succeed.

The Saga Begins

Hello! Do you like having a nice garden? What's that you say? Your garden was overridden by bamboo?! Oh, the humanity!!!

In a more serious tone, I'm a student in a research elective and if you couldn't tell by my 60's B-movie dialogue in the upper section of this post, my research is centered on bamboo. This fast growing menace is a terror to nature, spreading faster than a falling tree, growing quicker than it takes to go back inside on a rainy day, and more destructive to the environment than a nerd with their own fossil fuel power station. I am, of course, researching physical barriers to potentially isolate these war machines of slow growing rage. If you like my obviously good sense of humor, or wish to watch me try to fiddle with objects like I'm a wannabe Macgyver, then feel free to release the inner stalker present in all of us and follow my blog.

Thank you for spending some of your valuable free time reading my blog, and enjoy!

The Scientific Process and How I Came to Love The Tri-fold Poster Board

 Ask yourself, how does a teenager go from anxiously eyeing their Netflix subscription to getting an award at a science fair? If you said the scientific process, then you are absolutely correct!

 The whole process is somewhat a form of confused cause-and-effect, as a scientist sees an effect and tries to find the cause or the same in reverse. To put it into perspective, imagine a staircase covered in ice. You must very carefully ascend the steps, or you will simply fall back down. That is, unless you salted the steps, giving you a clear path. The figurative salt is the scientific process, as it makes clear the steps that must be taken to succeed.

 I hold my experience in past science fairs as the structural foundation to my idea of what the scientific process looks like, but I use my experience as a video gamer to form the big picture. When I get stuck in a video game, I use a walk through to learn how I should progress in the game. When I am handed an entry form for a science fair, I use the scientific process to build myself an experiment out of the first real issue I come upon. 

 My gaming and education have even come together in the past, which gives me such a good comparison, but a person's idea of what the scientific process stands for is always going to be different.