NMR Facility Decommissions 300 MHz Instruments
After more than three decades of service to Penn State’s nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy facility, two 300 MHz instruments — the DPX300 and the CDPX300 — will be retired from service. Although the instruments will be leaving the Chemistry Building, they have found a new home at the Penn State Altoona campus, where they will be reinstalled for undergraduate education, training, and research.
The instruments will allow undergraduate students to engage in interdisciplinary education and training. The Altoona campus Department of Chemistry has made arrangements with NMR Associates Inc. for de-energizing the two 300 MHz Oxford magnets and packing and shipping instruments. The associates will rebuild and re-energize the magnet and fit it with the current console to make it usable for students and faculty members at the Altoona campus.
These two 300 MHz instruments were first brought into the facility in the late 1980s. DPX300 was procured with the help of two chemistry faculty members, Professors Ayusman Sen and Gregory Geoffroy, while the CDPX300 belonged to Professor T. C. Mike Chung of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Over three decades, several colleges including Eberly College of Science, Engineering, Earth and Mineral Sciences, Agricultural Sciences and Medicine have benefited from these instruments. The instruments were continuously utilized for characterization of small molecules, polymers, materials and natural products until their retirement.
Penn State’s state-of-the-art NMR facility offers high resolution cutting-edge solutions and solid-state NMR services to support research, education, and training across all campuses of the University. The facility is located in the basement of the Chemistry Building at University Park and is managed and administered by the Department of Chemistry. The facility houses nine high-resolution Bruker NMR instruments (400 MHz to 850 MHz 1H frequency) with a wide range of capabilities: high-sensitivity cryoprobes, high-throughput sample changers, solid-state probes, and diffusion.
The recent console upgrade of two 400 MHz instruments and addition of auto-samplers to 400 MHz and 500 MHz systems will allow the facility to acquire data in high-through-put fashion and improve the usage efficiency of the instruments and adequately fulfill the demand for NMR times at the University Park campus. This has enabled the NMR facility to decommission the two 300 MHz systems to save energy and resources, reduce facility expenses, and free up space for the installation of a recently federally funded helium recovery system.