These brief descriptions of projects will hopefully provide current and prospective students a sense of the possibilities that exist in KU undergraduate research.
1994 Sean Park
Sean was interested in learning how to program and do some computer interfacing.We designed and constructed a computer-controlled heating system for a high-pressure optical cell. The pad heaters were turned on and off through a relay by a digital output on a multifunction card. Temperature feedback was provided by an interfaced thermistor.
Computer-Controlled
Heater for a
High
Pressure Optical Cell
1994 Ron Cope
One simple indicator of crude oil quality is polarity. We tried to develop a fluorescence-based method to determine crude oil polarity using pyrene and PRODAN as polarity-sensitive fluorescent probes. With the instrumentation available at this time (the converted PE 650-40) we were unable to distinguish between the native crude oil fluorescence and the probe fluorescence. We did program the fluorometer to acquire 3-D excitation, emission scans of native crude oil fluorescence. When we realized we reached a brick wall, we chose another project that incorporated the use of time-based fluorescence measurements to determine the phosphorescence lifetimes of glow-in-the-dark toys. We have used this as an introduction to kinetics in our general chemistry lab, and to introduce nonlinear, least-squares fitting of experimental data in Physical Chemistry.
Determination
of Crude Oil Polarity using Fluorescence
and Phosphorescence Lifetimes of Glow-in-the-Dark Toys
1993 Robert Berner
We constructed a high-pressure optical cell that was used with our IR spectrometer to attempt to determine what happens to hydrogen bonding in trifluoromethane when pressure and temperature are increased beyond the critical point.
Development of a Computer-Interfaced Fluorescence Spectrometer
1993 John Fowler
One of my graduate school colleagues, who worked for Dupont, donated a PE 650-40 fluorescence spectrometer to KU. We took over control of the monochromator stepper motors by building our own stepper motor drivers that were driven by pulses from a $150 data acquisition I/O card. We read the detector signal from the chart recorder output using the same I/O card. I wrote software to control this instrument from a PC and stored files in ASCII format. We used this instrument to support both teaching labs and research projects. This was part of the basis of a successful NSF-ILI proposal to incorporate fluorescence techniques in our curriculum.
