Off to a Solid(s) Start

July 8

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Today I got to do something that I haven't had the opportunity to do by myself yet: solid sonication. When looking for Bromide, we usually get water samples that need a simple 10-fold dilution, but today we got seven ash samples that needed bromide testing. Since we can't put anything solid through the IC, we needed to get all the good stuff into a liquid that we can process, and we do that through solid sonication. It is a pretty simple process, we just weigh out some of the sample, mix it with water, and put it in a sonic bath for 30 minutes. The sonic bath 'shakes loose' the anions we are looking for from the ash into the water.

Another cool solid sample we get sometimes in IC are from the local beer factories at different stages of production. They look for a bunch of different things to make sure there is nothing contaminating the beer or its ingredients before they finish the production, bottle it up, and send it out to consumers. Below you can see barley and hops samples from before (left) and after (right) they have been partially processed prior to fermentation.