Investigating the optical properties of various chemical compounds using UV-vis spectrophotometers is an essential part of education in chemistry. However, commercial spectrophotometers are usually treated as "magic black boxes", where the dominant majority of optical elements are hidden "under the hood". This often limits…

Marble, formed by the metamorphism of limestone, is commonly used in the construction industry and sculpting. The mineral in marble is either calcite [CaCO[subscript 3]] or dolomite [CaMg(CO[subscript 3])[subscript 2]] or sometimes both. The pure white Carrara marble from Italy was made a household name by Michelangelo, the famous sculptor of the…

This guided-inquiry, upper-division undergraduate organic lab experiment, a hybrid of problem-based learning (PBL); process-oriented, guided-inquiry learning (POGIL); and peer-led team learning (PLTL) has been developed to ease the transition from the undergraduate lab to a research lab environment. The characterization of a mixture of camphor and…

Chemical engineering is mostly taught using traditional classroom teaching and laboratory experiments when possible. Being a wide discipline encompassing topics such as analytical chemistry, process design, and microbiology, it may be argued that brewing of beer has many relations to chemical engineering topic-wise. This work illustrates how…

An experiment seated in an industrial context can provide an engaging framework and unique learning opportunity for an upper-division physical chemistry laboratory. An experiment that teaches NMR/MRI through a problem-based quality control of citrus products was developed. In this experiment, using a problem-based learning (PBL) approach, students…

The commercial simulator Aspen Chromatography was employed to study and optimize an important new industrial separation process, weak partitioning chromatography. This case study on antibody purification was implemented in a chromatographic separations course. Parametric simulations were performed to investigate the effect of operating parameters…