[Nat360]

Hi All.
I needed some help in terms of expanding on my research. My research question is "how does the concentration of a saline solution impact its absorption in sodium polyacrylate?".

For my experiment, I essentially created a NaCl solutions with varied concentrations and found how much 0.05g sodium polyacrylate would absorb of these differing solution concentrations. I collected all my data and graphed it and found that it had a down sloping trend; so as I increased the NaCl concentration the absorption reduced.

However now I am stuck as I am clueless on how to move on from here. Are there calculations further on the sodium polyacrylate absorption like a constant that I could compare my value for to find an error?

Thanks for your help in advance.

[Borek]

There is no precise rule nor recipe for what you should do. It is definitely not "free for all" and "everything will do" situation, but to some extent what you do with your results is up to you.

You should definitely try to describe the trend in a numerical way - find and fit a line/curve that nicely follows the data. You can try to guess what is the reason behind the trend, and possibly propose ways of checking whether the suggested mechanism is correct, or not.

You should try to search the literature and see if someone has not tried to research the effect before, to be able to quote their findings in your report. It might happen that the effect they report is a different from yours, which should lead to discussion of whys.

[Nat360]

There is no precise rule nor recipe for what you should do. It is definitely not "free for all" and "everything will do" situation, but to some extent what you do with your results is up to you.

You should definitely try to describe the trend in a numerical way - find and fit a line/curve that nicely follows the data. You can try to guess what is the reason behind the trend, and possibly propose ways of checking whether the suggested mechanism is correct, or not.

You should try to search the literature and see if someone has not tried to research the effect before, to be able to quote their findings in your report. It might happen that the effect they report is a different from yours, which should lead to discussion of whys.

Hi thanks Borek. I have made a trend line and found it was decaying exponential line and had an r^2 value of 0.89 or so. I also found other literature that relates to the topic but was not similar enough for me to compare results. Most of these were relating to sodium polyacrylate in concrete to increase rigidity so the trends are quite different.