Creating the Ag-incorporated membranes
Author: Yibing Hu | Major: Finance | Semester: Fall 2023
Hello, my name is Yibing Hu and I am a Finance major at the Walton College of Business. I am also on the pre-med track, and am currently conducting research under the guidance of Dr. Jingyi Chen and Elizabeth Reed, a graduate student, both from the Chemistry department. I recently completed my Fall 2023 semester where we built upon our prior research of using titanium dioxide (TiO2) membranes to degrade dyes. As TiO2 is relatively common, easy to obtain, and demonstrates photocatalytic activity, it possesses high potential in treating wastewater.
TiO2 is known to be a good photocatalyst, but it can be inefficient and unstable. To remedy this, scientists have incorporated metals such as copper (Cu) and silver (Ag) into the membranes for stability. This semester, we have been trying to incorporate silver into the membranes to determine how much of a difference the metal would make. The membranes were tested for their ability to degrade varying concentrations of methylene blue dye under dark and light conditions. Each was placed in a controlled environment under the specified lighting condition, and images were recorded at specific time intervals.
We previously encountered issues quantifying the extent to which methylene blue droplets degraded, as we had been recording changes over time using an iPhone camera. This semester, we used ImageJ to analyze our data. The human eye is prone to error; using technology to precisely calculate the amount of change and generate numerical values that we could graph enabled us to create accurate calibration curves and plot kinetics to analyze. We imported the pictures we took of the membranes, cropped them to include just the membrane, and then inverted the images. We concluded that ImageJ was a reliable way to analyze our data, showing that digital quantification is possible.
In order to find what wavelengths the TiO2 and the Ag-incorporated membranes were most active at, we performed a UV-Vis spectra. However, our results showed that both membranes had almost identical spectra, which led us to believe that the Ag present was likely below the detection limit. A potential area for further research would be finding ways to effectively add Ag or Cu into the membranes.
Moving forward, I hope to continue this research by researching the membrane’s efficacy with other dyes and working on successfully incorporating Ag. As this topic has many potential applications, we want to study how the membrane works with other materials and contaminants.
Through conducting research this semester, I learned many new skills, including creating the Ag-incorporated membranes, using the ImageJ machine and analyzing the images it took, and graphing and performing calculations to quantify the data. I am grateful to have had the Honors College Research Grant funding to support me in my academic endeavors. As a Walton Honors student, I will be looking to either write a business plan or conduct research in a business-related topic for my Honors project starting next semester, which is quite different from STEM. Regardless, I believe the STEM research experiences I have acquired so far will help me overcome academic challenges I may face in the future.