UW Cosmogenic Isotope Lab

This was the device I constructed for his Cosmogenic Isotope dating of glacial moraines of Antarctica.

	For lack of a better name for the device, Dr Stone came up with “Friedbats”. It stood for “Flexible Reconfigurable Ion Exchange Device for Beryllium Aluminum Titanium Separation”. Since he was paying me, I went along with it… (This was programmed in Visual Basic)
	A shot of a solenoid multi valve bank.
	The whole device (PC, Monitor, Pumps, Power supplies …ect..) all fit on a cart which we could wheel around as necessary in the lab. The blue device in the upper right was the LEGO configuration.
	We used the robot LEGO’s specifically because they were cheap and made out of polypropylene. The little Teflon cups pictured received Beryllium, Aluminum & Titanium dissolved in Hydrofluoric Acid. Apart from being very deadly stuff, the drying Hydrofluoric Acid vapor would quickly corrode any metal in the area, so using something like polypropylene was excellent for this application. (..additionally, we really didn’t really have the $15,000 to spend on a proper sampling device.)

INTERESTING NOTE: I also went on a somewhat arduous excursion to map parts of DEATH VALLEY.

It’s quite a forbidding place; and a grad student had been doing it alone until he found the remains of someone who had expired in the heat.

He quickly found the funds to get a partner…Me!

A few pictures from the excursion are here. (…along with Meteor Crater & the Grand Canyon)