SWU Groundwater Tracing Laboratory

In August and September of 2008 CEHP's Laura Kreitzer travelled to Southwest University to continue training at the Project's Groundwater Tracing Laboratory. She set up a new hydrology laboratory at Southwest University of China, and held training sessions in the lab so students could learn and use the lab to provide direction in understanding China’s underground water flows.

The Groundwater Tracing Laboratory was completely set up to be able to analyze water and charcoal samples for seven different dyes. The lab was fully decontaminated with bleach solution and standards were made for all dyes in smart solution, which was also made in the lab. During the lab set-up, another set of standards were made to double-check our newest calibration of the Spectrofluorophotometer (Shimadzu RF-5301 PC), which turned out to be correct.

Additionally, Jia Peng (graduate student), trained for one week in the lab working mostly with the Shimadzu and learning techniques in the lab. There were also two other students, Balance and Zhang Dian, that trained for 2 days on making standards and calibration of the Shimadzu. After moderate training for a week, there was a training session held in the lab for students to learn how to work the equipment. 15 students were at the training session, where they were provided hands on experience and were able to ask many questions about the lab which were successfully answered.

Click for photos from the Groundwater Tracing Laboratory.