Undergraduate Experiment: Instrumental Analysis of Spectrometers

After installing the NMReady at SIAST, I had the unique opportunity to participate in a laboratory experiment when the students were not using the spectrometer as a tool for structural elucidation, but rather as an instrument itself. They were learning about the parameters that are vital for obtaining good spectra – a concept that I had learned about in a theoretical sense, but as a synthetic chemist rarely thought about when collecting routine data.

We decided that for chemical technologist students, and chemists alike would benefit from familiarizing themselves with these parameters. Consequently, I put together a pamphlet defining the important variables, and providing beginning students simple procedure to observe their effect on spectra directly, as I feel like it would be beneficial to synthetic chemists to keep this in mind – even when just collecting routine data!