Day 7

This morning we went over the last abstract that we didn't get too yesterday. Then we went to one of the interns labs where he talked about his project that he has been working on. After that I went to my lab. Today me and my lab partner began to run trials with the sieve shaker machine so we could learn how to use it better before

Sieve Shaver Machine 

we started our actual project experiments. We used samples of sand and 8 different sieves to run these trials. We used different sizes of the sand sample to compare how the grain size distribution would be affected. When doing these experiments we just used dry sieving because our wet sieving experiment is not set up yet. After doing 2 experiments; one with a sample size of 200 grams and one with a sample size of 997.30 grams we believe that the smaller the sample size the better the values come out and we have a lesser percent error. After we finished our 2 experiments my partner had to leave early, so I began working on some python code to find the mean and standard deviation from columns in a cvs file. I analyzed this image in the program ImageJ:

It ended up looking something like the picture above. If you look closely you can see the yellow lines over each particle of sand. The data from this image then changes into a cvs file which I can upload into python to create a code that will automatically give me the results on the mean and standard deviation of multiple values (ex: mean, min, max and length). Tomorrow I have to finish the code and test it to make sure it works.