46731-B6
Investigations of Intermolecular Interactions in Liquid Hydrocarbons
The PRF funding has allowed me to hire three undergraduate students. The students have worked full-time during the summer and one worked part-time during the academic school year. The students ranged from freshman to junior and gained valuable experience with the operation of state-of-the-art Raman and Fourier Transform Infrared spectrometers, as well as with aspects of simulations using computational chemistry software packages.
One student worked on the experimental measurement of the optical properties of liquid cyclohexane while another of the students worked on the experimental measurement of the optical properties of liquid cyclopentane and n-pentane. The cyclohexane results have been submitted for publication and the cyclopentane and n-pentane results are currently in preparation.
The third student worked on a computational study of the fundamental interactions between mixtures of simple organic molecules, in an effort to better understand how the fundamental interactions such as dispersion forces and in particular improper hydrogen bonding affects the structure and properties of hydrocarbons. It is hoped that the results of this work will be submitted for publication late this fall.
One of the students was successful in obtaining a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Undergraduate Summer Research Award which covered ~60% of her salary during the summer, thus reducing the contribution from the PRF funding to her salary.
All three of these students are continuing their undergraduate studies at CBU and will continue to work on this project next summer. One student is planning on attending graduate school on completion of her undergraduate degree. The other two students are entering their junior years, one is seriously considering graduate school as a result of her work on this project and the other student is still undecided about his future studies. The work of my research group was featured in a promotional video prepared by CBU as part of the recently announced $20 million capital project for a new Energy, Environment and Sustainability research center at CBU.
All of these subprojects have advanced our knowledge of how important weak intermolecular interactions are to the structure and properties of even nonpolar simple hydrocarbons. Work will continue over the next couple of years.
The PRF funding, also allowed me to attend the 91st Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition held May 24–28, 2008, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where I presented some of preliminary results of this project. Not only did this give exposure to our work but very good feedback was received during the discussion of the work and as a result a couple of innovative areas of investigation in this project will be explored over the coming years.
