The Chemistry Department at UAF has a wide range of modern instruments and computers available to undergraduate and graduate students. We have been fortunate to be able to upgrade much of our instrumentation when we moved into the new Natural Science Facility. The instruments are used at all levels of instruction.
The Department now has a Varian Mercury 300MHz multinuclear NMR. Professors Clausen, Stolzberg, and Kennish (UAA) have received this instrumentation as part of the National Science Foundation Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement (NSF-ILI) Program. It will be used in approximately five courses over the next two years. It will also be used in our research programs.
The Department has installed (Sept. 1998) a 300 MHz Varian NMR for use in undergraduate labs and research. It is used mainly in Chem 324 (Organic Lab) and Chem 433 (Physical Chemistry Lab). It has multinumclear capability--for hydrogen, carbon 13, fluorine, phosphorus--and is controlled by modern software. It is capable of one and two dimensional NMR experiments. It was obtained through a grant from the National Science Foundation Instrumentation and Lab Improvement (NSF-ILI) program.
The Hewlett Packard 5890GC is interfaced to a HP5972 mass selective detector. It is used for separating and identifying the components of volatile complex mixtures. The capillary column allow for separation of complex mixtures to individual components and modern search software allows for identification of these components (with due care). It is has been used extensively for natural products chemistry and environmental chemistry research projects. Students in chemical analysis of dynamic systems lab (Chem 394), organic lab (Chem 324), instrumental methods lab (Chem 413) use the instrument as part of their regularly scheduled work.
We also have a Hewlett Packard 6890GC, with flame ionization detector and autosampler. It is has been used extensively for natural products chemistry research projects. It is also used regularly in the organic chemistry lab (Chem 324), chemical analysis of dynamic systems (Chem 394), and instrumental analytical chemistry lab (Chem 413).
The Beckman 126-168 gradient HPLC with UV/VIS diode array detector is used for separating and identifying the components of nonvolatile complex mixtures. It complements the GCMS, and is particularly useful in separation of compounds of biological interest.
The Perkin Elmer 3000 atomic absorption spectrometer (AAS) with autosampler is used for determining the concentration of dissolved metals in water (and other liquids) at concentrations ranging from parts per billion (micrograms per liter) on up to parts per million (milligrams per liter). The autosampler and associated software takes a lot of the dogwork out of the analysis. This instrument was purchased with a grant from the National Science Foundation for undergraduate laboratory instructional improvement. Students in a variety of introductory courses (Chem 100, Chem 105) and upper level courses (Chem 213, Chem 433) use the instrument routinely.
We have three Hewlett Packard 8452A and one Hewlett Packard 8453A diode array molecular absorbance UV/VIS spectrophotometers for quantitative analysis of UV absorbing and visibly colored solutes. They all operate under the Windows ChemStation software. These instruments are used in most of the laboratory courses that we offer.
We also have fixed wavelength spectrometers (Spectronic 21) for routine absorbance measurements.
The Nicolet Magna FTIR550 Fourier transform Infrared spectrometer for structural characterization of organic compounds and for quantitative analysis of certain gaseous and liquid phase solutes is used in organic, analytical, and physical chemistry labs. We have a 10m gas sampling cell and sampling hardware for diffuse reflectance, attenuated total reflectance, and external reflectance geometries.
The Department has a Sorvall RC5B centrifuge and a Beckman LS3801 liquid scintillation counter in our instrument room. The Department also has a wide array of balances, computers, pH meters, simple spectrophotometers, and other common instruments. Furthermore, specialized labs such as biochemistry have access to research equipment in faculty research labs.
Our computational facilities are modern, useful, and available to students. We have a lab with nine 200MHz Pentium based PCs and four 500-MHz PCs, with a wide variety of software for use in all of our courses. Molecular modeling is carried out mostly with a network installation of HyperChem Professional. Printers are available for color and black and white printing. We have a joint lab with Physics that has 15 platforms, each with a Macintosh and Pentium class processor. This lab has software directed at students enrolled in introductory Chemistry and Physics classes. We have also installed eight Pentium based machines for the instructional labs where the introductory, analytical, and inorganic labs are taught. The machines are all networked and have direct connections to the Internet.
Supercomputer Center Visualization Lab
For research applications, the Arctic Regional Supercomputer Center
(ARSC) has installed a Visualization Lab with several Silicon
Graphics O2 workstations, and a SGI Octane workstation. HyperChem
and Sybyl molecular modeling programs are available in this lab.
ARSC has also installed Gaussian98 on a Cray supercomputer.
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last update 2-20-2000 by JWK