User:Matt Hartings/Notebook/Photosynthesis/2012/02/02

Biomaterials Design Lab

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Objective Today I am testing the UV-Vis capabilities of the ocean optics system. Specifically, I'm playing around with the different optical setups on the qpod cuvette holder and with the white light source that ocean optics sent. Description The UV-Vis source needs 40 minutes to warm up. I turned it on at 10:30 am. To open the qpod controls, first you have to plug in the qpod and then you have to "connect" the bluetooth communication from the computer to the qpod (done by first clicking the bluetooth icon in the status bar and then clicking connect for the qpod). The qpod is run with the program Q-Blue Wireless Temperature Control found on the Desktop. To start the Ocean Optics program, first turn on the JAZZ spectrophotometer. For a UV Vis measurement with the qpod, we want to be sure that the collumnating lenses are being used. Open the spectrasuite software. I placed a 7.5 uM sample of [Ru(bpy)2(phen-NH2)] in CH3CN into the qpod. Turn the shutter to open. Spectrasuite should show the Jaz spectrometer in the right-hand corner of the screen. On the graph part of the screen, it shows an intensity plot of what the detector is seeing. You can set the scan time (integration time) and the number of scans to average. I had to change the integration time to 1ms due to the intensity of the light coming out of the lamp. There are a variety of ways to save and display data in the software. I removed the sample so that I could get the lamp intensity profile to save with an integration time of 1ms and an average of 23 spectra. You can save the spectrum as a processed spectrum, a reference spectrum, or a dark spectrum. I need to play around with this a little more. But I chose to save the spectrum as a processed spectrum. There is a way that you can use spectrasuite to save the dark and reference so that what gets displayed for an actual data point is the Absorbance or corrected spectrum. For this first run, I decided to save the processed intensity spectrum and do all of the data workup in excel. I put in the Ru(bpy)2(phen) sample again and saved a processed version of that sample. I tried saving the reference spectrum, but couldn't quite figure it out. I'm going to have to look through the manual some more. Data Notes This area is for any observations or conclusions that you would like to note. Use categories like tags. Change the "Course" category to the one corresponding to your course. The "Miscellaneous" tag can be used for particular experiments, as instructed by your professor. Please be sure to change or delete this tag as required so that the categories remain well organized.