Week Four: Tuesday

I ran the six calibration solutions on the ICP and got reasonable results so I continued to run the calibrations with the first sample set I made yesterday. This data should follow a similar trend-line to the first sample run because the only difference was the concentration of the samples. However, the buffer solution had a much higher sodium concentration, by a factor of ten, causing the relative sodium in each sample to be much lower as seen in the graph below. Tomorrow, I hope to find the cause of this inconsistency and possibly make new samples at the same dilution. 

Figure shows the difference in the sodium concentration for each of the samples and the common buffer used for all samples. Because the measured level of sodium in the buffer was so high, the first few samples to show a concentration less than zero.