No abstract

Students in an introductory or nonmajors chemistry course have little to no background in scientific instrumentation. However, advanced instrumentation can be employed to further students' understanding of basic chemistry and scientific methods. In this article, we describe an experiment for an introductory chemistry course that incorporates the use of mass spectrometry for sample analysis. Several different air samples are collected that represent various chemical processes, and the composition of the air sample is predicted on the basis of known chemical principles. A gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer is used to analyze these samples, and the relative quantities of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and argon are calculated. On the basis of the data, the hypothesized sample composition is validated.

No abstract