The Department of Chemistry occupies over 24,000 sq feet in Padnos hall of Science.  The freshly renovated interior has added flexibility and capability to the teaching and research laboratories. As a result, student access and training on state-of-the-art instrumentation has increased.

In the past few years, the department has added several new pieces of equipment including several new IR spectrometers, an inert-atmosphere glove box, a high performance liquid chromatography from environmental chemistry and a fluorimeter that is used in course work and by several research groups.  The department also recently received a Major Research Instrumentation grant from the NSF for a new 400 MHz NMR that will be installed in May of 2018. 

Additional information regarding separation technology, spectroscopy and additional supporting instruments and infrastructure may be found below.

A list of instrumentation housed at Padnos Hall  and Cook-DeVos Center for Health Sciences may be found here.

Separation Technology

The department has a wide-range of capillary gas chromatographic capabilities to analyze volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds.  These holdings include two GC-mass spectrometers which are heavily used for chemical identifications.  For analytes that cannot be volatilized, we have multiple high-performance liquid chromatographic systems with a variety of detection methodologies that can handle a diverse group of analytes, ranging from carbohydrates to drugs, to salts.

Spectroscopy

A strength of our department equipment includes our molecular spectroscopy capabilities.  With a new, multi-element NMR on order to replace an aging unit, we are able to keep two NMR’s functioning so that synthetic chemists can identify products that form in their reactions.  There are also a large number of FT-IR spectrometers to complement our NMR capabilities.  Each of these IR spectrometers possesses diamond ATR sampling units to aid in rapid data acquisition.  To do work with UV-visible light, we possess several UV-visible spectrophotometers and a research grade spectrofluorometer. 

Additional Support

Department of Chemistry supports optical and electrochemical laboratories as well as a suite of the instrumentation for thermal analysis.