There was Tension this week- Jessica Salazar

On a previous blog post done by my fellow teammate, she was very concern for the type of filter we order and planned to use. Although her information was not incorrect in terms of carbon black, she didn’t know that we were not using a filter made of such a substance but rather charcoal which is essentially carbon. Thus the filter has a name of both charcoal and carbon filter and I see why she was concern, in the picture of the carbon filter, the filter was black in color and it could have easy sprung such a misconception. At first when she confronted me about it, I was in a state of disbelief because I felt that she didn’t trust me and she was questioning my research. Then I saw the article that she had read and I was shaken a bit but soon realized that we were not talking about the same thing. I knew prior to her article that the filter was technically made out of charcoal, created in a safe manner as explained in the article bellow. I then tried to calmly explain to her that this was not the same thing, I showed her picture of the same filter and demonstrated how the are not all black and thus it was another reason why the filter was not made out of carbon black. A picture of the filter is provided below.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/question209.htm

The filter we are using is actually made from charcoal that has been treated with oxygen, opening up pores between the carbon atoms, and making the charcoal very porous. Such type of filter are used widely in a variety of respirator mask including the infamous respro mask, which has been used by thousands and thousands of people from around the world and has shown no signs of causing detrimental health effects to the body. A picture of the mask is provided below. I was very much looking forward to using such a filter because it is electrically charged and it is capable of capturing certain small particle in the air that may be pretty detrimental to the health of an individual. Therefore such a filter is pretty valuable and definitely worth our money since I found a pretty good bargain.

In the end we did decide to use it, after I carefully and calmly explained to may group that it was in fact safe to use and after I explain why it was so wonderful. Thank you for reading my rant, this will be my last blog post and I just wanted to thank all those who actually read my blog post and followed our group throughout the beginning and will continue to follow us until the end. Thank you and goodbye for now.