Establishment of a Regional NMR Site at Trinity University

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Chemistry (12)With the purchase of a Varian Mercury 300 MHz NMR spectrometer, we have created a regional NMR site by which six two- and four-year colleges and universities in the San Antonio region with no previous access to NMR instrumentation have easy and effective access to one which is housed at and maintained by Trinity University. To overcome the access limitation to use of NMR at a remote site, we have designed a process in which samples from the participating institutions are delivered to Trinity University, are prepared for analysis by a student worker, run automatically with a sample changer, and the data (free induction decays, FID's) downloaded to a Trinity University server. Students at the participating institutions transfer the FID's to a local computer to be processed using free software. Each of the six institutions have thoughtfully chosen a set of experiments from the chemical education literature to use in their curricula. The participating institutions pay only for the time of the student worker and a nominal fee for deuterated solvents. They are therefore able to control and incorporate as much NMR access as they can afford. The pedagogical advantages are several. First, students process their own spectra and learn to make decisions about integration or expansion of the various regions of the spectrum. Second, since the FID is retrievable from a server, they can return to the spectra for reprocessing if necessary. Third, by running spectra on real samples, they have opportunities to deal with impurities and develop greater sophistication in interpretation. Finally, being able to acquire spectra of real samples allow students to identify unknown products of chemical reactions.