Day 9

Today we started off with our morning meeting by going to my lab to explain what the GRIT machine is, that was explained in a prior blog. After the presentation was done me and my lab partner got started on working on our official experiments for dry sieving. We still have to wait to do our wet sieving because we are waiting for parts to be shipped. We started off by using a 200 gram soil sample of sand with our first experiment. We had a couple problems with that small of a sample size after we were sorting out the grains after it went through the sieve shaker. We noticed that the 200 gram sample size was too small for the scale we had to use. Most of our samples were coming up as 0 even though there was some sand but it just didn't register because it was less than a gram. So after we went to lunch we decided to double our sample size to see if that would help with the size of the different distributions. We saw that raising the sample size helped us not have the problem of the 0 grams, we still saw a couple but not as many. With the higher sample size we also had a smaller percent error overall which is good. After we finished our second experiment and calculated everything, I graphed the the data using the different sieve sizes, the percentage weight and the cumulative percentage weight of both the 200 gram and 400 gram data sets. 

200 gram sample data graph

400 gram sample data graph 

There weren't major differences with the 2 data sets but there were some minor changes in the graphs. Something that was constant with both data sets was which sieve had the highest percent weight in both sets, this showed that a major portion of sand in general is around that size, which was 150 microns. After i finished the graph me and my lab partner went around the whole building (inside and out) and used a ASD spectrometer with a fiber optic pistol grip to collect the reflectance of all different types of materials. 

ASD Spectrometer with fiber optic pistol grip in the feild