Last Entry (Rotimi Opeke)

I'm home now.

I just finished my lab work on Friday and I was able to pull some 3D images of the surfaces I looked at under the microscope. Have a look.

Now that I'm in Nigeria I will finish up the lab report and my paper as a whole. In terms of applied uses and a better understanding of what exactly an "active layer" looks like, check out the link to this article. The "active layer" is the highly transparent film that is on the piece of glass that the hand is holding.

Ala Viva and thanks for reading

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/11/photovoltaic-polarizers-could-make-self-charging-smartphone-drea/

Sleep is for the weak (Rotimi Opeke Week 7?)

Hey guys!

This is my last week! I can't describe how happy I am to be finishing up this week and heading back home to Nigeria. All though I have lots of work to do when I get back home (college applications, Convocation speech, summer homework and SAT prep), I'll finally be reunited with family....but until then....

This week I have finally started the analysis. For 10 hours on  Monday, I prepared my own organic solar devices for the first time and was able to perform electrical characteristics (I finished it all before midnight!). My devices worked perfectly and gave me the data that I need, so I am really proud of that and it makes my job in analysis a lot easier. Although the graphic extensions in Excel leave much to be desired, I can get enough from the program to analyze my results fully (Power Conversion Efficiencies, Fill Factor, etc.)

Today was my morphology testing and it was a much shorter day. I prepared my mini-samples for the AFM (Atomic Force Microscope) in the advanced instrument building and have been measuring the surface geography of these samples for the past 2 hours. The scanning is really slow and takes about 15 minutes for each image, but I don't mind staying a bit later to get all of my work out of the way.

Tomorrow looks like it is going to a day full of teaching as I need to pass on my knowledge to a visiting researcher before I leave the US on Saturday. Because I developed all of my methods by myself and have used very little help from established literature, I need to pass on my knowledge to another person in the lab to continue as I prepare to go back to school.

Ala Viva.

6th Week (Rotimi Opeke)

14 days left.

We'll its me, myself and I in the lab now, going lone ranger and finishing my project while most people are finishing their overseas project. I leave on August 6 so the time to buckle down is really here and my opportunity to completely finish has presented itself. I plan to get the morphology part of my experiment finished this Friday as I selfishly and expensively booked the AFM microscope for the whole day. On the other hand, I plan to finish the electrical characterization part of my experiment early next week (Monday or Tuesday). All I have to do is have the solar devices ready so that the guys in Electrical Engineering can thermally evaporate aluminum to act as my cell's second cathode.

This doesn't sound like much, but along with the 4 hour long SAT classes I'm attending in the morning, it seems like I have little time to do all that I need to do. It's been to bed early and up early for the past few days and I don't expect things to change until I leave for Nigeria.

However, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Rotimi Opeke

Long Overdue Part 2 (6th Week)---- Rotimi Opeke

But now, there is another problem that has come to the forefront. I cannot build the solar cells devices that I need because of a lack of proper foundation. Because we build these miniature solar cells on a glass substrate, the glass must be coated in one of the two necessary cathodes. The glass that we bought is completely covered in ITO instead of a strip that we need, so it seems we will manually have to erode the excess ITO from the surface of the glass. Using some fancy equipment and some UV staining, we should be able to erode away the ITO that we need, but nothing is certain. Wish me luck, because at this point this will decided whether I will have to come back in the fall to finish the experiment.

Long Overdue Part 1 (6th Week)---- Rotimi Opeke

My 1 1/2 week absence from the blog has been unexcusable, but things have been very busy in the past 2 weeks and I hope you can excuse my lack of journal entries.

After a weekend away from NJ with the Peddie Basketball team in Albright, PA, the push began to start recording my experimental data. I had met with Dr. Soboyejo on Friday of the previous week, right before he had left for Nigeria and he had asked me to take x-ray diffractions of the samples I was making. This was a bit of a surprise to me, but he claimed that recording chemical and structure composition were the two most "important" facets of my data. Unfortunately on Monday, July 11, the graduate students that were part of his research group informed me that I wouldn't be able to take X-Ray diffractions with the samples I was using.

Now what. My project had changed multiple times since I had come to the lab, and right when I was ready to begin, there was a problem. Dr. Soboyejo had long gone to Nigeria, and now it was up to me to draft a new project. With pressure to complete an actual project before I leave for home on August 6, I spent the next two days in Princeton Public Library writing and editing a new proposal that was as straightforward as possible.

Week 3 Part 2 (Rotimi Opeke)

Well the pressure is on.

I have a month left, and I still have much to do. The lab techniques for sample preparation are out of the way, I just need to learn how to analyze these samples. Although I have already taken a class in how to use the Scanning Electron Microscope, my PI still is asking for me to learn how to use the Atomic Force Microscope in order to analyze the active layers for my project.

 At the end of last week, I prepared dummy samples to run under the SEM microscope. They were created at 1/2 of the normal polymer concentration, specially meant for practice purposes only. In the hope that my project advisor was going to show up today, I ran these dummies under the SEM microscope, but to no success.

I was able to procure a clear picture,  but at a very low magnification, and it seems it was only a scratch mark and not anything special with the surface morphology. The microscopy specialist told me that I will have to learn how to coat my samples in ions so that the SEM machine works better. It's a shame that the next class is on July 25....

I have a lot of questions and doubts and not a lot of answers from anyone (but the microscopy expert Jerry). I hope to see my advisor in the lab, but no response from text messages in the morning seem like a clear sign that I won't get those questions answered today.

Ala Viva

2nd Part of Wk2

I'm really bad with the days and since my last post was the end of week one we'll just call this the end of week two because it has been a while.....

So in the last few days to be honest, not much has been done in the lab. My "advisor" Tiffany Tong went to her hometown Milwaukee for her high-school reunion and my PI is in Nigeria getting funding for his research. So for the past few days, (friday included) I have just been mixing solutions in preparation for creating my actual lab samples on Thursday. Everything is really expensive so I can't treat it like mixing gatorade in water and go for saturation; I have to be extra conscious to dilute all my practice runs by a factor of 10^-1 or 10^-2 before spin coating it on the glass slides.

Seems like tomorrow is a big day for me because I will be attending a SEM training session bright and early tomorrow morning (9:30 pm) and probably working until 7pm tomorrow night. After the class, I have to finish making P3HT:PCBM:Ti02 active layers on glass slides, meet with my PI to finalize project details and meet with my adviser to coordinate schedules for the coming weeks. I doubt I will be able to play for Peddie in the Summer League tomorrow and that hurts, but there are more to come.

Ala Viva

Timi Opeke (2nd Part of WK 1)

I started midweek last week, so this is officially the second part of my "first week" in the lab. Because my "advisor" has been working on other projects and running errands for the past week, we have met on Friday, Monday, and today.

Things are pretty good so far and I can't complain. Today was my first day working mostly independently in the lab, and was practically my final test before my "advisor" went to Wisconsin for her high school reunion. All in all thing went well, and with some help from a visiting researcher, I was able to get all the work done before my summer league basketball game at 7PM.

Although I would love as much help as I can possibly get in the lab, people are treating me like a visiting researcher so I am being pushed to do a lot of work in the lab independently (but mostly supervised). This is great because there is more pressure to be attentive to detail and take pride in your own work, but now I understand why everyone flocks for free coffee at 4.

Nonetheless it still is exciting and I'm happy to go into the lab even just to clean. Tomorrow I'll be going in to teach a post grad how to create her own active layer so I'm pretty suped. Professor Timi Opeke has a nice ring to it :)

First Day (Rotimi Opeke)

Yesterday was my first day actually working in the lab and it went pretty smoothly. Besides preparing sample active layers to get me accustomed to the techniques, it was a slow day because Dr. Soboyejo or my "project guidance counselor" had to help another PhD student get their project back on track after a one-week holiday. Nonetheless, it was a good day, and I only expect my involvement to increase.

Upon my arrival at the Engineering Quad, I crossed paths with Pat Quinn, who was taking a small break for Lunch in the E Quad Cafe. It's amazing that at least 3 Peddie students are working in the same building and we may barely see each other. We had a small chat and he told me a little bit about his work, but soon we both parted ways and headed back to our respective labs. Tiffany had just come back from picking up lunch so I ended coming back to the E Quad Cafe and keeping her company while she ate.

Soon after she finished eating, we went to have a conference call with Dr. Soboyejo in her cubicle. He was really helpful in finalizing some details of my project, but you can only get so much help over the phone compared to in person. I was soon kicked out by another Princeton PhD student who is also working on a project with Tiffany, so I went ended up sitting in the Coffee Room and using the Internet to research more about my project. I didn't know that the call was going to last for 1 1/2 hours, but I read as much as I could between accidental naps.

When she came back, she told me that we still had some paperwork to finish before I could enter the lab, so I had to copy some information from one form to another for multiple sheets before I was all set to work. By this time it was closer to 4:45pm and Tiffany was anxious to leave, but I reminded her that I hadn't even gotten the practice in the lab that I wanted. Though she was reluctant, she helped me rush through a procedure to prepare active layers composed of P3HT and PCBM. I actually was surprisingly accurate and efficient given the time constraints that she placed upon my work, and had three finished active layers (pre-annealed) in an hour.

She was impressed at my attention to detail, but after that 3 hour lab safety training session, I'm obsessed with cleanliness and precision in the lab. They don't wear eyeglasses in the lab, so I brought my own (THANK YOU WORTHINGTON LABS) and I wouldn't stop measuring and re-cleaning things until my heart was content. This may slow me down a bit in the lab, but I think its good for the long run.

By the time we had cleaned up and I had gotten all my things, it was closer to 7pm and we decided to call it a day. In conclusion, the day was not what I had expected, but it will only get better from here.