Team:UCLA/Notebook/Materials/20 August 2015
Attempt and Fail of spinning aqueous Tamura
| component | volume | total mass |
| silk (140 mg/mL) | 750 uL | 105 mg |
| Tamura (2.97 mg/mL) | 70.7 uL | 0.21 mg |
- Note that the initial silk concentration was 140 mg/mL.
- After adding Tamura, it dropped down to 127.9 mg/mL.
- Dangerously low....
- After adding Tamura, it dropped down to 127.9 mg/mL.
- Tried a spin
- 70% v/v ethanol coagulation bath
- initially tried to pump at 1 uL/min
- waaaaaay too slow. Rough calculation says that it would take over 10 hours to spin the entire thing
- we bumped up to 16 uL/min (Lewis paper recommendation)
- this 12.8% w/v dope is not concentrated enough to spin
- a fiber would come out, but it's too fragile to pull over to the godet
- So now, we're left with ~2 mL of 14% w/v silk
- According to the Lewis protocol, "We find that storing the silk for a few days will allow it to reach the required concentration."
- So we'll let it sit over the weekend and see if it increased in concentration.
- According to the Lewis protocol, "We find that storing the silk for a few days will allow it to reach the required concentration."