Facilities and Equipment
The chemistry division is housed in state-of-the-art facilities on the third floor of Parmer Hall.
Facilities
Teaching Space
Dominican has four chemistry teaching laboratories:
- Rooms 308 and 310 are used for general chemistry labs.
- Room 331, the organic chemistry laboratory, occupies 1,585 square feet and has sufficient hood space for 18 students, chemical dispensing and chemical disposal.
- Room 336 is a multipurpose teaching laboratory space used for physical, analytical and introductory chemistry.
- Room 337 is an instrumentation lab.
All teaching laboratories are equipped with movable tables, stools, whiteboards, screens, network ports and ceiling-mounted digital projectors. The laboratory spaces also are equipped with fume hoods, sinks, in-house distilled water, forced air, vacuum and natural-gas lines.
Research Space
The chemistry division also has three student-faculty research laboratories: Rooms 329, 332 and 333. These are multipurpose laboratories with fume hoods, cabinets, sinks, counter space and computer desks for student researchers.
Stockroom
Dominican University maintains a chemical stockroom, a chemical waste room and a chemical hygiene office, staffed by a stockroom manager who is responsible for purchasing, storing and safely disposing of all chemicals and gases used in the laboratory. The 1,040-square-foot chemical and glassware storage stockroom is equipped with:
- 400 cubic feet of shelf space
- Eight 45-gallon Securall vented safety storage cabinets
- A Barnstead 3560 20-cubic-foot corrosion-resistant refrigerator designed to store caustic materials and acids with an enameled steel interior and exterior with stainless steel door liner
The laboratories at Dominican are routinely monitored for safety compliance by the University’s chemical safety officer and the River Forest Fire Department. Each laboratory has developed a chemical hygiene plan, and emergency shower and eyewash facilities are available in case of need.
Additional support equipment on the third floor of Parmer Hall are a Scotsman SCE275 Undercounter Compact Cuber with Storage, a Labconco Flaskscrubber glassware washer and a Millipore Milli-Q water purifier.
Equipment
The organic chemistry teaching laboratory is equipped with:
- Bausch & Lomb Refractometer 6498 AB
- A Precision mechanical convection oven
- A polarimeter
- 24 microscale laboratory kits
- 12 VWR Lab Companion HP-3000 heating/stir plates
Three additional Mettler Toledo AB104-S/FACT balances with 0.1 mg readability and 110-gram capacity balances are available in the analytical teaching laboratory.
The general chemistry teaching laboratories are equipped with:
- 12 Fisher Scientific Isotemp heating/stir plates
- Six Denver Instrument Ultra Basic 10 pH/mV meters
- Three Flinn Scientific Ultra-8V table top centrifuges
- 12 computer controlled Vernier LabPro instruments with pH electrode, drop counter, colorimeter, gas pressure regulator, ORP sensor, current probe and radiation monitoring accessories
Instrumentation
One of the research laboratories contains a high-speed counter-current chromatograph (HSCCC) instrument TBE-300A (Shanghai Tauto Biotech Co., Shanghai, China) with three multilayer coil separation columns connected in series: 290mL total column volume with a 20mL sample loop. A Neslab RTE7 constant temperature-circulating bath (Thermo Electron Corporation) controls the coil temperature within the range of 5–35 ◦C. The HSCCC system is equipped with a ChromTech Series I digital single-piston solvent pump, a JMST Systems VUV-14D fixed wavelength UV–vis detector with preparative flow cell, and an Advantec CHF122SC fraction collector.
The chemistry discipline’s 554 square foot instrumentation laboratory is equipped with six Perkin Elmer research grade instruments purchased new no earlier than 2007.
The HPLC system consists of a Perkin Elmer Series 200 binary pump, vacuum degasser, autosampler, Peltier column oven, and adjustable wavelength dual-beam UV/vis detector (190 -360 nm). An additional HPLC component is a Gilson FC203B fraction collector.
The second chromatographic instrument is a high-performance Perkin Elmer Clarus 600 gas Chromatograph with Flame Ionization Detector. The system is controlled through a dedicated desktop computer loaded with Totalchrom software configured with access to network drives and printers.
The first spectrometer is a Perkin Elmer Lambda 650 UV/VIS spectrometer equipped for high performance measurements between 190 nm and 900 nm with less than a 0.17 nm resolution. The spectrometer is described as a double beam, double monochromator, ratio recording UV/Vis spectrophotometer with microcomputer electronics
The second spectrometer is a Perkin Elmer LS 55 Fluorescence Spectrometer. The monochromator based LS 55 uses a high energy pulsed Xenon source for excitation in order to minimize photo bleaching of samples and provide a long-lived excitation source. The instrument is controlled through a dedicated desktop computer with FL Winlab software.
The third spectrometer is a Perkin Elmer Spectrum 100 FT-IR spectrometer with Universal ATR sampling accessory and spectrum software on a dedicated computer. The Spectrum 100 is a mid-IR Fourier transform spectrometer with useable range of 7800-350 cm-1 with a resolution of 0.5 cm-1 to 64 cm-1 in software selectable increments of 0.1 cm-1.
The fourth spectrometer is a Perkin Elmer AAnalyst 200 atomic absorption (AA) spectrometer. The system incorporates innovations similar to those offered on expensive research-grade instrumentation. For example, double-beam Echelle optics combine with a solid-state detector to deliver high performance AA flame levels.