Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Turns out most of my classes suck. And by "most" I mean all but Mechatronics, which might still start sucking. I had such high hopes going into this semester. I thought my profs were all nice guys and likely to be good teachers. I thought the classes would be interesting. . . Nope! Sure Not!

I'm really beginning to be frustrated with my Thermal Systems class. It doesn't help that it meets at 8:00 in the morning, which for me is really early. The class so far hasn't been interesting in the slightest. It seems to mostly be a revamp of Thermodynamics which I took last year with Troutt, possibly the worst professor I've ever had. But the bitch of it is I sort of got it all with Troutt, and now having an entire extra class of it is beyond boring. The assignment due tomorrow consists mainly of looking numbers off a table for properties of water. I could care less what the enthalpy of water is at 1MPa. I'm also getting tired of writing the First Law of Thermodynamics (heat + work = heat + work. . . whoop-dee-freaking-doo) over and over again.

Today was a lame day. I went in to work this morning before lab with the intention of making a batch of PZT. The process basically goes like this: clean out a jar, plastic cap and magnetic stir bar with Acetone and Isopropyl Alcohol, then stick it in an oven between 100-120 degrees C to dry out. Some of the chemicals in PZT tend to explode when mixed with water, so the jar has to be really dry. If the oven is too hot, it'll melt the cap (something like 135 degrees I think), so there's a digital thermocouple rigged up to the oven so you can maintain it at the right temperature. The jar and cap have to sit in the oven for about a half an hour. Then you stick it in a glove box (a big Plexiglas box with rubber gloves sticking into it that supposedly is kept very dry) to start mixing up the chemicals. The amounts of the chemicals are measured using a scale, so you zero it, then add however much of each of the chemicals. Most of the chemicals are liquid and the composition of the PZT has to be very exact, so you end up standing there with your hands in a box dripping chemicals from a pipette for about an hour or so. Then you cap the jar and stick it in an oil bath that is sitting on a hot plate and has to be maintained at exactly 92 degrees (why not 91 or 93, I don't know) for a half an hour. Then you stick it back in the glove box, drip in some more chemicals, take it back out of the glove box, put back in the oil bath and let it sit overnight in the oil bath this time at 62 degrees. Only problem is, you just finished using the oil bath at 92 degrees, so it takes a half an hour to cool it down, and that’s when you put the oil bath in a cold water bath to cool it off. (My idea. I thought it was clever.) So basically you're standing there adding chemicals to a jar for the better part of 3 hours.

So today I go into the MEMS lab to make some PZT. I went to clean out the bottle, and discovered that we were out of Acetone. So I plodded down to the clean room to get some Acetone, then plodded back up to the MEMS lab to finish cleaning out the bottle. Then I went to put it in the oven, only to discover that someone made off with the thermometer, so I had no way to know the temperature of the oven. (There is a melted bottle cap nailed to the wall next to the oven as testament to what happens when the oven is on too hot.) While I was at it, I took a look at the oil bath, and discovered that the thermometer in that (one of those lame glass ones with the fluid in them) was destroyed. Also the bath, which is just mineral oil, and is supposed to be clear, was dark brown, and you couldn't see through it anymore, which, according to Jeong, meant that it needed to be changed out. So I find another glass container to use for the oil bath, then grab a couple bottles of the oil from under the fume hood. . . One of them had only a splash of oil left, and the other one was down to less than a quarter. Together they had maybe half of the required oil. Loud noises.

So I ordered another thermometer for the oil bath, and tomorrow I'm going to have to order up some more of the mineral oil. Apparently the oil isn't carried by WSU Central Stores, so I have to order it from another company, which means it'll take a few days to get here.

After all that, going to lab wasn't much fun, and doing the homework for Thermal Systems wasn't very appealing either. Made me angry.