Students construct computer models of two transition metal complexes, solve their electronic structures, and inspect the resulting d-type molecular orbitals to identify which are non-bonding, sigma* antibonding, or pi* antibonding. After constructing a molecular orbital diagram, they determine which of the two complexes is likely to absorb light at a longer wavelength.
I developed this laboratory experiment for our instrumental analysis class. The course is taken by junior and senior chemistry majors, who for the most part have had one inorganic chemistry course and some physical chemistry. The laboratory is operationally very simple and has students record the UV-vis spectra of transition metal sulfate salts in water using volumetric technique. They record the molar absorptivities for each peak and use this data to determine the number of waters of hydration for each salt by comparing with literature absorptivity values.
Students in a half-credit nanomaterials chemistry course read an article describing the electrochemical deposition of BiVO4 (Kyoung-Shin Choi and Jason A. Seabold, “Efficient and Stable Photo-Oxidation of Water by a Bismuth Vanadate Photoanode Coupled with an Iron Oxyhydroxide Oxygen Evolution Catalyst” J. Am. Chem. Soc.
These slides walk students through a solid state synthesis with a simple powder XRD analysis. This presentation was made to answer the question “How do I know what came out of the furnace?” for a general chemistry audience, assuming very little XRD knowledge. Specifically this shows using XRD with database searching to determine phase purity through pattern matching.
(This does not cover the fundamentals of XRD, please see related links for that.)
This is a very brief introduction to the origin of color in nanoparticle systems. A link to a video is included in the slides that shows the addition of the reducing agent to the gold precursor solution. The link is also available as a Web Resourse (below).
Cmap Tools is a powerful free program that can be used to create concept maps. The program works on any platform.
Thanks to Kurt Birdwhistell for posting the link to this tool to the forum a while back.
This 5 slides about gives a basic introduction to synchrotron radiation. Information includes how the particles are accelerated, how they travel to the individual instruments, and where synchrotrons in the USA are located.
This literature discussion is based off a Nature article by Buck, Bondi, and Schaak (Buck, M.; Bondi, J.; Schaak, R. Nat Chem 2012, 4, (1), 37-44 DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.1195). It spans topics of solid state, crystallography, characterization techniques, and comparing inorganic to organic synthesis.
This in-class activity was created at the NSF-TUES sponsored workshop at Penn State, June 2013. It is based on the article from Ray Schaak’s group (Buck, Matthew R.; Bondi, James F.; Schaak, Raymond E. “A total-synthesis framework for the construction of high-order colloidal hybrid nanoparticles” Nature Chemistry 2012, 4, 37-44, DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.1195), which Ray presented at the workshop.
This presentation provides a short introduction to Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships and its use in Inorganic Chemistry. A brief introduction to Linear-Free Energy Relationships and the Hammett Equation is given, followed by three examples of how QSARs have been used in inorganic chemistry.