Abstract

The Instrumentation documents were designed for students in Instrumental Analysis and in Advanced Spectroscopy. Students often have a difficult time relating the mathematical expressions that describe instrument response to the operation of the instrument. I started to use Matchad to demonstrate these concepts and help students make these connections. The documents allow students to change instrument parameters and observe their effect on the instruments response. Students experiment with variables and find relationships without using instrument time. The documents discussed here are used for teaching electronics, signal enhancement, Fourier transforms, FT-IR and NMR. Some simplifications have been made to reduce the complexity of the documents and to help highlight specific concepts in each document. These documents can not replace an instrument, but they do help students understand how to operate an instrument. Most of the documents include a set of questions to help direct the student's exploration.

JCE Internet Article

Using These Documents

1. Adobe Acrobat files (*.pdf) - This is an electronic document format. Information about the Acrobat reader is available from Adobe. These files are provided for users unfamiliar with Mathcad. You may view a sample printout of the documents as pdf files. These files are not interactive but they do provide a sample of what is available. Interactive use of the files requires a copy of Mathcad. If you do not have access to Mathcad, you may use a freely distributed viewer from Mathsoft (see below) for some of the documents at this site.

2. Mathcad 6.0 (*_6.mcd) - This is the most recent release of Mathcad. To use these documents you need a copy of Mathcad 6.0 (available for Windows or Mac). Additional information about Mathcad is available from MathSoft's Home Page. To view these files you may do one of the following:
   1. Set your browser to save the file, and then open it from Mathcad.
   2. Configure Mathcad as a helper application and load the documents directly from your browser.
   3. Use the URL to open documents from the Web directly into Mathcad. A Mathcad 6.0 document containing links to the documents described here is available at http://science.widener.edu/~svanbram/links.mcd.

3. Mathcad 5.0 (*.mcd) - These files are provided for users without access to the most recent version of Mathcad. In most cases, these documents are identical to the 6.0 version. Some features available in the most recent version of Mathcad are not available, and some the most recent documents are not available as 5.0 files.

   The Mathcad 5.0 documents are also made available at this site so that users without access to Mathcad can try them out using Mathcad Explorer. This is a freely distributed web browser from MathSoft includes the ability to read and use Mathcad 5.0 documents. With Mathbrowser, the documents are interactive. Information about downloading, installing, and using Mathbrowser is available from MathSoft.

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Please send any comments, corrections, or suggestions to svanbram@science.widener.edu.
Last Updated Friday, June 06, 1997 19:30:40
This page has been accessed times since 6/1/97.