The Department of Chemistry and National Experimental Teaching Demonstration Center of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering have been carrying out education and teaching reform. They fully leveraged the role of scientific research in talent cultivation and undergraduates’ innovative and practical abilities while helping them improve theoretical learning.
In recent years, the physical chemistry teaching and research section, together with teachers of the experimental center, have cooperated with researchers in the Key Laboratory of Molecular Photoionization Science and Materials to combine the advanced teaching philosophy with modern scientific research methods and made remarkable achievements.
As a basic process, charge transfer is widely used in chemical reactions, life processes, optoelectronic materials, and energy conversion. It is necessary to incorporate its fundamental theory and practice content into undergraduate teaching. Given this, researchers of molecular photoionization and teachers jointly guided three students of the Department of Chemistry to design a new physical chemistry experiment that studies the charge transfer of organic molecules. The innovative experiment explores the relationship between the redox potentials of benzoquinone and molecular structure by electrochemical cyclic voltammetry with theoretical chemistry calculation. The electrochemical instrument used in the experiment is simple. The spectral analysis is intuitive. The introduction of quantum chemistry calculation adds theoretical methods of modern chemical research to basic experiments. The experiment builds bridges between undergraduate experiments practice and future scientific researches by its comprehensiveness and advantages. It is a new physical chemistry experiment integrating experiments and theories well. It helps students to build logical relationships between microscopic molecular structures and macroscopic properties, better understand the fundamental theories of quantum chemistry, organic chemistry, statistical mechanics, and thermodynamics, and learn and explore across the board.
Three students, namely, Ji Xuan, Liu Xiaomei, Li Muzi won a silver medal with this experiment in the 6th New Experimental Design Competition for College Students of Excellence. In the past two years, as a supplementary experiment of the basic physical chemistry experiment course, the new experiment has been successfully carried out and well received by students in Hou Debang Chemical Elite Class. In the future, it will continue to be a required experiment for elites classes.
The achievement has been published in the Journal of Chemical Education. The experiment was mainly finished by Ji Xuan, Liu Xiaomei, and Li Muzi, guided by Zhu Lina, Feng Xia, Ma Xiaofei, Yu Xi, Hu Wenping, and other teachers. In the beginning, this experiment was also supported by Professor Liu Junji, Professor Li SongLin, Experimental Teaching Demonstration Center of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of TJU, physical chemistry teaching and research section, Key Laboratory of Molecular Optoelectronic Science and Materials of Tianjin Municipality and so on.
