User:Yuchen.li94/Project 0

My Instructor's user page which points to this.

Please delete everything in italics as you follow the instructions.

Project Preference
Water transferring

Problem Statement
Transferring 1/4 cup of water to another container with the least amount of provided "beads."

Project Plan
Our goal is to find out how to transfer water with the least amount of beads.

1st week: Testify the properties of "beads" and try to find out what they are actually. With all the quantitive data we collect, our group and I can predict the result of our experiment and provide a hypothesis.

2nd week: after we receive the suggestions from peers and our instructor, we can improve the method of experimenting and collect more valid data. As shown in our PowerPoint in class, we not only need to know what the beads are, but also have to find out quantitive properties correlating to its water-absorbing ability.

3rd week: With all the data we collect, we have to do the actual experiment and see how much these beads actually take to absorb 1/4 cup of water.

4th week: Find the difference between the actual result and our production in order to find the confound variables or errors. Finally, we are going to present how many beads we use, what the quantitive properties are, and other factors that may effect our result in the class.

Week1 Narrative
I did research first and I assume the "beads" are Silica Gel. However, after the first group discussion, our conclusion is Polyacrylamide. Due to our reference, I calculate how many beads we can roughly use, which is from 47 to 70. So I put 45 beads in the 1/4 cup of water in a container with a sealed lid, and all the water was absorbed. I also got the pictures from other members of my group so I put up the PowerPoint to present in our class. According to the instructor's responses and peers' suggestions, we should do more experiment about the qualitative properties about the beads so we can have a more accurate prediction next time. Instead of throwing random amount of beads, I need to find some certain conditions, such as temperature, pressure, time, surface area, to make each bead absorb the most amount of water in order to solve the problem.

Next step is to do more research and test how some conditions influence the amount of water absorbed.

Week2 Narrative
According to the further exploring, the size of beads before putting in the water really matters. The bigger original beads are, the more water they absorb. We may not do any further experiment for this subjects any more, but I guess if we can artificially select the biggest beads and distribute them evenly on a flat surface with 1/4 cup of water. It may decrease the amount beads we use to absorb 1/4 cup of water.