Inorganic Lab Experience

 In this experiment, palladium complexes were synthesized from palladium chloride. The initial product was a benzonitrile-palladium complex, but this was reacted with ethylene to form a Cl-bridged ethylene-palladium complex. The structure of this is fascinating for two reasons: first of all, the bridging Cl ligand is interesting, and the way the ethylene bonds to the metal center through its pi-bond is even more interesting. Super cool stuff.

 Ferrocene is one of those compounds you just get excited to hear about due to its vast amount of uses and interesting properties. In this lab, ferrocene underwent acid catalysis to add an acetyl group to one of the cyclopentadiene rings. This experiment was initially used to prove the aromatic nature of these Cp rings, but has come to be useful to substitute different things onto ferrocene compounds.

 This was yet another incredibly informative lab where I got to learn a lot about the platinum metal group and some of the properties that make these metals so unique and useful. Particularly, the trans directing effects of planar platinum structures and how different the properties of different configurations was surprising, as I found out that the cis version can be a great medicine while the trans version can be a deadly poison.

 This experiment, we synthesized wilkinson's catalyst and its bromo substituted derivative by reacting rhodium chloride with triphenylphosphine. Pretty yellow crystals were formed, and it was very informative to see the differences in FTIR and HNMR caused by the substitution by bromo groups. While there was supposed be a catalyzed decarboxylation by the complex onto n-heptanal, this did not work due to the low yield of the reaction and the micro-scale of the reaction.

 In this experiment, the amino acid glycine was used to complex to a copper metal center. Then, the product was heated to convert from kinetic to the thermodynamic product. It was fun to see the differences cause by a single change from trans to cis conformations, and how these differences show up in the infrared spectra.

 This experiment was an easy one, and we were yet again using a compound I was familiar with, EDTA. This multidentate ligand exists in different states depending on the pH of the solution it is in, and thus required precise tuning of pH in order to successfully perform the desired reaction, and kinetics studies were performed to see how the different pH levels affected the reaction rate.

 This was one of the experiments that I was looking forward to performing the most, but not for typical reasons. First of all, photocatalysis is such a cool and interesting field of chemistry that is ever evolving to change the future of energy production, so the reaction itself was awesome to learn about. However, more cool is heat sealing glass test tubes using a torch. God that stuff is cool and applicable to future glass involved projects.

 This was an all around interesting experiment, with a beautiful looking product molecule and some interesting reactants along the way. In particular, making and using sodium phosphinate was fun, although a little more difficult than expect: it is very easy to overload the system with too much NaOH and it can cause oversaturation. This led to a very low yield and tons of contaminants, but I learned how important it was to be careful when making precursor solutions.

      This experiment was pretty cool, it demonstrated how everyday compounds can still have interesting properties. Saccharin, a common artificial sweetener, easily complexes with metal centers through a variety of different electron donor groups. The compounds synthesized, copper and palladium saccharin, were both pretty in color, being blue and baby pink respectively.  

      This experiment we used a compound I'm very familiar with from work: acac! It was used to synthesize chromium and manganese metal complexes. Despite being very familiar with acac and this lab using very simple techniques (double boiler being the hardest thing to set up) it was somehow extremely difficult to get right, and a very minuscule yield was collected for both metal complexes, less than 3% in both cases. However, it was nice to learn to use magnetic susceptibility balances.

      In this experiment, three different metals were used: copper, palladium and ruthenium. It is cool to work with the same ligand on different metal centers, as it taught me a lot about what makes them complex in similar manners. It was hard for me to get a good grasp of hard and soft acid base theory, but that improved later on. This was a very fun a simple lab, and it was cool to learn about DMSO. This is the structure of Ruthenium-DMSO complex with four DMSO ligands and two Cl ligands.  

      This was our first experiment and I was unsure what to expect; this chemistry lab was much longer in class length than any other and that was kind of intimidating. It was also my first physical class since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. However, things ended up going relatively smoothly due to precautions and other measures taken by the UCF staff such as measuring our temperatures before entering the building, ensuring we wear our masks, and handing us experimental kits that are disinfected between uses.     While it did take long and the product wasn't completely pure, we did end up succesfully synthesizing two different Cobalt-mimt complexes. This experiment yielded a really clean FTIR spectra that was easy to break down to see different functional groups and contaminants, which was really a really good skill to sharpen up early in the semester as it would come to help with every single lab after this. A 75% yield was impressive, bu...