Given the importance of self-healing polymers for chemistry education, herein, we introduce our latest research results in self-healing materials based on thioctic acid into undergraduate chemistry laboratory. In this experiment, a natural small molecule, thioctic acid (TA), and a few other commercially-available reagents have been used to make a…

Traditional engineering textbooks are substantially limited by approaches relying on analytical solutions where most of the applications are described by differential equations without simple analytical solutions. An alternative is to design a textbook around computer-program-based simulations, where the simulations progressively evolve through…

This paper describes a computational exercise at undergraduate level that demonstrates the employment of Monte Carlo simulation to study the conformational statistics of flexible polymer chains, and to predict solution properties. Three simple chain models, including excluded volume interactions, have been implemented in a public-domain computer…