This past week, we ran into a little bit of a stall and had a "back to the drawing board" moment. We originally wanted to do high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis, but we ran into a problem with that because our chocolate samples wouldn't dissolve in the solvents that the HPLC machine uses. The next idea was to use liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy (LCMS) or to find another HPLC method, so we sat down with some literature to see what other people have done and find ourselves a starting point.
For more details:
Monday, June 21, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
June 1, 2010 to June 11, 2010
A ton of things were done in this time frame. To summarize:
1. More IR data was taken for each sample for statistical purposes.
2. IR spectra was taken on control substances.
3. Made lots of progress in Java IR spectra analysis program.
4. Distillation of a sample was carried out to separate a volatile substance.
5. GC-MS was done on the separated volatile substance.
For more details:
1. More IR data was taken for each sample for statistical purposes.
2. IR spectra was taken on control substances.
3. Made lots of progress in Java IR spectra analysis program.
4. Distillation of a sample was carried out to separate a volatile substance.
5. GC-MS was done on the separated volatile substance.
For more details:
Monday, June 14, 2010
May 24, 2010 to June 1, 2010
Overview:
This past week, we decided to use Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR... we'll be saying IR for short) [learn more here!] and take a scan of all of our samples. So we took an inventory of all the chocolate products that we needed to analyze, and tagged each of them with a number so that we wouldn't be biased in our experiment (i.e. if Charmian knew which sample was Lindt, she might either 1) be tempted to eat it or 2) mess with the results). After all the IRs were taken, we tried to see if we could notice any trends just by eyeballing them and Andrew also decided that he would write a program using Java for spectra analysis.
For more details:
This past week, we decided to use Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR... we'll be saying IR for short) [learn more here!] and take a scan of all of our samples. So we took an inventory of all the chocolate products that we needed to analyze, and tagged each of them with a number so that we wouldn't be biased in our experiment (i.e. if Charmian knew which sample was Lindt, she might either 1) be tempted to eat it or 2) mess with the results). After all the IRs were taken, we tried to see if we could notice any trends just by eyeballing them and Andrew also decided that he would write a program using Java for spectra analysis.
For more details:
Blog is online!
Hello, world!
We have put together this blog to provide weekly (if not more) updates on our chocolate analysis project. These updates will contain our progress so far in terms of our methodology, but the results will not be posted. Sorry. If you're really curious about the results, we would be more than happy to e-mail them to you.
So what is our chocolate project? It's a study that uses various chemical analyses in order to find chemical differences between the varying qualities of chocolate. This includes the differences between expensive and inexpensive chocolate, the geographical origin of the cacao bean used to create the product, organic versus inorganic, sugar-substituted versus regular chocolate, etc. The overall goal of the project is to test the claims that chocolate companies place on the labels of their finished products to make sure that consumers are purchasing what is being advertised.
We hope you'll enjoy reading our blog. :)
We have put together this blog to provide weekly (if not more) updates on our chocolate analysis project. These updates will contain our progress so far in terms of our methodology, but the results will not be posted. Sorry. If you're really curious about the results, we would be more than happy to e-mail them to you.
So what is our chocolate project? It's a study that uses various chemical analyses in order to find chemical differences between the varying qualities of chocolate. This includes the differences between expensive and inexpensive chocolate, the geographical origin of the cacao bean used to create the product, organic versus inorganic, sugar-substituted versus regular chocolate, etc. The overall goal of the project is to test the claims that chocolate companies place on the labels of their finished products to make sure that consumers are purchasing what is being advertised.
We hope you'll enjoy reading our blog. :)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)