Inorganic Lab Experience

 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.