Chem 102 Lab
Week #11 (29 March 2007)
MULTIDISCIPLINARY CHEMISTRY
This week we shall begin a three-week long multidisciplinary unit dealing with the industrial production strategies needed to make a main product and yet also consider the value of byproducts.
As students sequestered away in the world of academe, you often don't face the practical real world and have at best only a fuzzy comprehension of the monetary values of the subjects you are studying. For chemistry, do the names of Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Dupont mean anything to you? How about Genentech, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Amgen and Biogen, to name a few more? Chemistry is very big business in the world. As a retired member of two major chemical societies - the Royal Society of Chemistry (London), and the American Institute of Chemists, this instructor wishes to have you shake hands with the real world out there which supplies you with agricultural fertilizers, medicines, food additives, perfumes and fragrances, paints, plastics, metals, recycling and bioremediation, and a zillion other products that permeate your life. And what's this about being multidisciplinary? Well, so far we have linked chemistry and business.
Your lab group is now your own small company. Your company is to produce glycerol, which is used as a sweetener, a lubricant, a moisturizer in cosmetics and as the foundation for making dynamite for mining and tunneling. What is more is that money and supplies are extremely limited and you are at war and need to make explosives, but your enemies have prevented glycerol from be available to you. You must make it yourself. (By the way, this is exactly what happened to Germany in the midst of WW1: see - www.science.siu.edu/microbiology/micr425/425Notes/04-C&Energy.html) Multidisciplinary? Chemistry, business and now 20th Century history! (And there's more to come!!!)
In the previous months of this course, you have put a number of chemical tools and ways of thinking into your mental toolbox. Now you are being sent off into the world to do real work!
The three episodes in this unit are, and print out all links shown here:
Print this out also:
The structures involved in this 3-week glycerol unit.