MRG Lab Notes ©1998

MRG Lab Notes Directory

So you need to do a viscosity determination or measure thermal transitions by DSC? These Lab Notes should help for these and lots of other methods (but you have to read them first).

Tour Guides: Mathias Research Group

The following are absolute rules and we repeat them on every Lab Note so you'll remember them. Break them at your own risk and the ire of your friends and colleagues in Polymer Science!!

M Always wear safety glasses.

MM Never strike your classmates with blunt objects.

MMM ALWAYS be safe, be good, and learn!

The following are currently available, some in various degrees of development. Bear with us! We're working as fast as we can. If you find mistakes or have suggestions on improving these Lab Notes, let us know. If there is a new Lab Note we should put together, tell us and we'll get right on it.

• Monomer Purification
  Use this technique to remove inhibitor and water from your monomer before polymerization, without solvent!
• Dilute Solution Viscosity
  This is the introduction to hands-on determinations: how to add solvent or solution, time to equilibrate, drawing up the fluid and measuring efflux times. Sound tedious? It is!
• Concentrated Solution Viscosity
  And you thought dilute solution viscosity was tedious! At least we give you two methods here: Brookfield and Gardner; both use really thick solutions.
• Infrared Spectroscopy with a Perkin-Elmer 1600 Series FTIR
  A simple procedure for detemining the structure of a polymer or other chemical
• DSC on the Perkin-Elmer DSC-7
  Things actually start to get fun now- we let you use some instruments with computers (tools of the devil!) that tell you very interesting things about what you polymer is and why it behaves the way it does. DSC can give you Tg, Tm (if there is one) and heat of crystallization or melting; neat-o!.
• TA DSC
  There's more than one way to skin the proverbial cat (yech!) and same for DSC. TA Instruments makes a DSC also and here we tell you how to operate this instrument.
• Polarizing Microscope
  This sounds complicated (for a microscope) and it is if you mess with knobs you shouldn't. A polarizer lets you see strain or crystallinity in polymers. Even more exciting: there's a hot stage on this baby that really hums! It also sings the blues and lets you melt your sample while you look at it with the microscope: hot dog!
• Good Ol' Melting Point
  Think you know how to get a melting point? Maybe, but here we show you a couple methods you may not have seen before.

  The following Lab Notes are needed but haven't been developed yet (want to do one?). We'll get to them shortly. If you click on one, it takes you to the root directory; just click on "Back" at the top to come back here.

• Word
• Powerpoint
• Excell
• Access
• Scanning
• Macrogalleria
• Photoshop