Physical Chemistry II Lab Project by: Andrew Schultz, Cindy Dugan and Esther Wilcox.

Project Description

Being able to view and display data is important in chemistry fields. The World Wide Web is becoming an increasing source of information. From the World Wide Web, software is available which allows the rendering of molecules. Two of these programs, Chime and Rasmol were used as the basis of our project. Our goal was to explore these programs and make a user friendly web page which shows how they are can be used. We found some uses for these programs such as: the viewing of reactions, conformation changes in molecules, and vibration of molecules; the displaying of crystal structures, molecular geometries and protein structures. A couple of computer programs were written to generate the vibrations and crystal structures. A description of how to use the programs is given so that anyone who is interested can use these programs as well. Also included in the web page is a page of links to other useful chemistry sites.

These programs can be used by students and teachers. This project shows the potential for the use of computers and such programs in the classroom. These programs would make the visualization of chemistry easier for students.

Future Work

We implemented most everything that we could think of. However, there are a few possibilities for future work. The program for vibration of molecules could be changed so that it would work for molecules with more than three atoms. Also the program for the crystal structures could be modified to work for non-rectangular unit cells. In addition, these programs could be added to the web page, so that they could be executed by the user and the output of the program displayed for them.

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