Tuesday July 31, 2007

We begin an actual experiment, determining the effect of surfactant concentration on wrinkling. We made three slides each, then floated them on a 0.03% solution of surfactant, adding 0.2ul drops of water to incur wrinkling. The wrinkles are longer with surfactant in the water; we can see this without analyzing the data with Image J. We have problems with the films however, many are dirty. At the end of the day, Jiangshui added about 5 ml of surfactant to the water and you could see the wrinkles change as the surfactant dissolved into solution - they not only increase in length, they seem to increase in amplitude. Jiangshui is trying to discover a way to measure the change in amplitude in hopes of uncovering an explanation for it.