Uva Advance Lab Research
From July 13-August 7, I spent three and a half weeks at the University of Virginia. The program was called UVA Advance, which was specifically designed for high school students. Each day we went to two classes. My morning class was a lab research and my afternoon class was an Oceanography course. (Funny enough, my mom had the same professor for Oceanography when she took the course in 1997.) There were two of us assigned to this specific lab. Overall there were about five other labs also being used for UVA Advance. Each day we went to the Energy Science and Nanotechnology Lab and learned about Materials Science, but more specifically, the Electrical Engineering branch of Materials Science. There were three PhD students helping us and teaching us about what they were researching. We learned about insulators, conductors, semiconductors, and impurities and how electrical current/flow works. More specifically, how resistance and the seebeck effect affected different materials.
Materials Science and Engineering
Our main grad student was studying Bismuth Antimony and how its resistance can be used to cool down electronics from the inside. He showed us the steps to create a sample of this compound, and this process can take days at minimum. We went through the process of testing samples that were already made, instead of starting from the beginning. In a thermoelectric module lab we conducted, we measured the efficiency of different heat sources and heat sinks with voltage. A Thermoelectric Module with heat sensors on the top (heated side) and bottom (cool side) was put under different heat sources (hand, heat/solar lamp, and electrically heated ceramic block) to see the effects on temperature and voltage. This was then repeated with the heat sink placed in water, which is better at absorbing heat because the higher capacity water has compared to air for heat. As expected, the ceramic heater in water had the highest temperature difference and voltage. This was a great experience and it was interesting seeing the machinery and work of these researchers in a real lab setting!
