Benchtop Spectrometer Helps Students to Learn the Basic Practices of NMR

Magritek, a leading provider of compact NMR and MRI instruments, reports on the how their Spinsolve Benchtop NMR spectrometer is being used for teaching practical analytical chemistry to students at the technical High School in Wels, Austria.

HTBLA Wels is a higher technical vocational college of chemistry in Austria. Here, Dr Harald Baumgartner is responsible for the instrumental analytical laboratory. The lab's main focus is to teach students the basics of NMR (interpretation of spectra). Starting this year, all the students have to do their own practical work towards their thesis. This may be in the field of synthetic organic chemistry so NMR is used to determine the chemical structures of the materials the students synthesise. In other experiments, the course offers quantitative analytics (e.g. determination of the iodine number of vegetable oils) and kinetic studies.

NMR has been part of the curriculum for some years. However, this was through a very old 1H-60 MHz NMR. New instruments usually require fillings of expensive liquid helium for cooling the magnet. Dr Baumgartner said: “Compared to the old 60 MHz spectrometer, the Magritek Spinsolve benchtop spectrometer is so much easier to use. It is software-based so collecting and processing data is quite straightforward. As well as 1H spectra, our Spinsolve allows us to measure more complex spectra including 13C-spectra. Even 2-dimensional experiments are now available to the students.”

Magritek's Spinsolve benchtop NMR spectrometer is supplied worldwide to academics in teaching and research; also to industry for research and reaction monitoring through to quality control use. To obtain full details of the Spinsolve benchtop NMR spectrometer and the full range of analytical products from Magritek, visit www.magritek.com.