This week, Scott and I have been analyzing the results from our experiments. We have been able to complete our experiment five times successfully, now we are seeing the results and what they mean, and then we will change our experimental setup to see how results change. I am happy to have a much better grasp of our research and what it means, thanks to the analysis we have done. Here is a graph showing the saltwater concentrations we measured after adding the saltwater to our column, and then after 2 or 3 rinses with clean water. Drain, the blue section of each column, shows the saltwater concentration of the saltwater filtered through the column, which is diluted a bit by the clean water that might have still have been in the column from previous rinses. Then, the column is rinsed twice with fresh water, until the saltwater concentration is less than 1% of the one originally added. As  mentioned, we conducted five successful experiments, because we are discarding Cycle 1 and Cycle 3. Cycle 1 was our first, so the sediment inside the column was dry, making the results unrepresentative of what happens when we pour saltwater through sediment that already contains some clean water. For Cycle 3, we forgot to measure conductivity of the Drain, so we barely have any data on it.

I am excited to see how our research keeps evolving!

-Francesca