"Making pellets IS painful."

6/20 PM

After lunch, we removed the reagant mixture from the oven. At this point it was dry, fine powder, dark gray in color, and ready for pressing. The powder was removed from the petri dish and scraped onto a weighing paper.

Surprisingly, after using a $600 mortar and pestle, balls for jar milling that were also expensive, the method for removing our precious powder from the petri dish was a piece of transparency film. And this was the most valuable lab instrument we used. Valuable- meaning that it was highly effective for its designated task. There is something beautiful there. A one cent fragment of transparency film proved to be wonderfully effective when other more expensive tools left us feeling incompetent.

Once the powder was scraped onto a piece of weighing paper, we pressed them into pellets. Given the shape of the die, these pellets took the shape of hockey pucks. Here's the process:

The die is an expensive set of several metal pieces that is somewhat difficult to describe with words, but I'll paraphrase the process.

The metal casings have a hollow center (pictured above, at left). Some powder (less than 1.0 g) is placed in that center, surrounded by two hockey puck shaped pieces of metal (pictured above, at bottom). Then a metal cylinder is placed on top of the outermost metal hockeypuck (pictured above, at middle).

This assembly is then taken to the pellet press, a device that utilizes a hydraulic pump to apply pressure to the powder (by pushing on the cylinder) and smashing the powder into a pellet. The pressure used is about 3500 pounds per square inch.

Once made, the pellets were placed in an alumina crucible which is stable at high temperatures. They were stacked, and the crucible was placed in a furnace set for 930 degrees. The furnace was set to run for 48 hours, and ramp up by 5 degrees per minute.

The title of this post was a quote from our professor, Ram. He came into the lab late in the day and was watching us toil over our pellets. He wondered whether we were finding the making of pellets painful--meaning tedious, laborious, and painstaking. When we answered in the affirmative, he responded that, "making pellets IS plainful." I found this interesting. It was sort of a right of passage. This process is all a part of doing science. It is at times laborious, even boring. But I think his implied meaning was that everyone has to do these seemingly menial tasks to get the results that may in fact have a huge impact. Our project may not follow that trajectory, but the process we are engaging in is the same that Ram and many others have done as well. Things don't just happen, you have to work for them. And yes, making pellets is, in fact, painful.