Equipment

All major equipment in the Département de Chimie is shared, managed by full-time Ph. D.-level specialists, and available for hands-on use by students once they have been properly trained. The department is particularly well equipped for research of the type carried out in the Wuest group and includes individual laboratories for NMR spectroscopy (both in solution and in the solid state), X-ray diffraction, mass spectrometry, IR and Raman spectroscopy, thermal characterization (DSC and TGA), flow chemistry, and electrochemistry. The XRD laboratory is a regional facility used by researchers throughout Québec, and it offers access to multiple diffractometers for structural analyses of single crystals and powders. The primary single-crystal diffractometer is a Bruker D8 Venture Metaljet instrument with a liquid Ga source, which provides high brilliance and allows fast structural analyses even when crystals are very small. For example, we can visualize complete 3D structures in less than ten minutes with data collected using crystals with average dimensions below 100 μ. The instrument was the first of its type installed in any academic laboratory in the world, and it comes close to giving us an in-house synchrotron.

The group has two main laboratories with a total of twelve 6-foot hoods, house N₂ and vacuum, and equipment needed to carry out syntheses, crystallizations, and other processes under a wide range of conditions. Equipment in the group and nearby laboratories includes glove boxes, pressure reactors, sublimers, ball mills, optical microscopes, systems for purifying solvents, an automated synthesis/crystallization workstation, and a benchtop powder diffractometer.