One of the main reasons I started the OpenRAMAN project was to enable amateur chemists and students to validate synthesis they used in their home/pet projects. Without metrology instruments, it is impossible to perform science correctly and chemistry is no exception to that. I already discussed the “blind faith” approach Read more…
One of the main reasons I started working on Raman spectroscopy was the ability to actually observe what was going on during a reaction. Some folk told me one day that chemistry was all about faith: you mix two compounds and even if you don’t see anything you have to Read more…
I recently shared some results about measuring the kinetics of the ethyl acetate reaction. At the time, I was not entirely satisfied by the results due to the fact that I didn’t know what was the exact relation between the returned coefficients of the least square method and the actual Read more…
Two weeks ago I presented a global methodology to quantitatively decompose the spectra of mixtures into their respective components providing that their raw spectra were known (aka measured separately). Today I’m presenting some experimental results based on this technique to measure the kinetics of a well-known organic reaction: the esterification Read more…
There is no doubt that Raman spectroscopy is an extremely powerful tool for the amateur to confirm the identity of a chemical compound that was synthesized. In this post I will show that our DIY Raman spectrometer is also able to deliver quantitative results with a high accuracy. More precisely, Read more…