Well, the semester is underway. All systems are go.
Today I taught my Chemistry of Art course, Organic Chemistry, and Instrumental Analysis. Plus, I did an organic lab today as well. It turned out to be a long day (I also mowed my lawn).
A few weeks ago, I was really nervous about the Instrumental Analysis course. Now, I'm starting to get really excited about it. I'm team teaching it with a colleague. I am going to focus on instrumental chromatography (GC and LC) and structural elucidation (NMR, IR, MS and UV-Vis). My colleague is going to cover what amounts to instruments used for advanced analytical analysis. In the end, I hope our students will have a general understanding of how instruments are used and what they can (and cannot) tell us.
I'm not going to get into the electronics of instruments. We will talk about signal-to-noise, but not about A/D converters and rectifiers or Zener-stabilized voltage regulators. I'd rather talk about J-couplings, COSY and McLafferty rearrangements.
Our first experiment will probably be the analysis of isooctane in gasoline using GC-FID. I'm going to have them change columns and everything. It should be fun.
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2 comments:
Great! You're focusing on the useful stuff!
Chemistry of Art sounds like a kick-ass elective.
It is too bad such a class wasn't around earlier so that such instruments could be applied to QA issues in a professional brewing setting. It sounds like a good blog post for those who may be employed by a brewery.
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