Setting a lab is not an easy task. However, with many-years of strong experience in synthesis of carbon nitride materials and their applications in organic photocatalysis the list of required equipment is clear. Thanks to the start-up fund provided by the Chinese University of Hong Kong via Vice-Chancellor Early Career Professorship Scheme the first batch of equipment has arrived. So, meet our work horses!

A muffle furnace. Calcination of melamine or urea at 550°C is a classical method to synthesize graphitic carbon nitride. Our oven can achieve temperatures up to 1100°C and has a chamber capacity 12L, which is sufficient to prepare few tens of grams of carbon nitride in a single experiment. With 5-10 mg of this photocatalyst required, imagine how many experiments our team can set!

A centrifuge. Sodium poly(heptazine imide), a photocatalyst that we use the most extensively, is typically prepared via ionothermal approach by calcining melamine with NaCl at 600°C. This method gives the material particles with the diameter of around 100 nm. Workup requires washing the reaction mixture with water to remove excess of NaCl. On a small scale, centrifugation of poly(heptazine imide) dispersion in water at 13000 rpm for several minutes is the best method to remove NaCl.

Schlenk line. This piece of equipment serves for multiple purposes. We typically use it to degas the reaction mixture and achieve oxygen-free environment in the reaction mixture via “freeze-pump-thaw” procedure.

Naturally, Schlenk line requires a bottle of inert gas and a pump. Our rotary vane vacuum pump achieves 0.022 mbar. By repeating “freeze-pump-thaw” procedure 3 times, residual oxygen content in the reaction mixture is less than ~10 ppm, which is comparable to that in the atmosphere of a glove-box!

General purpose oven. No lab is possible without an oven for drying glassware. Here is ours.

A set of magnetic hot plate stirrers. A wise man said: “There may not be enough magnetic hot plate stirrers in an organic chemistry laboratory”. Here is a part of our fleet – magnetic glass ceramic top plate stirrers with external Pt100 temperature sensors for accurate and precise temperature control.

LEDs. One cannot perform photocatalytic experiments in the dark. Here are our light sources – 50 and 100 W LED modules that produce quasi-monochromatic radiation with photon wavelength 410 nm or 465 nm. The team is grateful to Mr. Kwok Wan YUE (technician of the electrical workshop at the Department of Chemistry of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) for assembling these essential for us devices from commercial components!

Rotary evaporator. It is also known as “rotavap” or “rotovap” (colloquial), or “Roti” (in German, according to our PI, is a colloquial version with a tender connotation used in Brandenburg state, at least). Those who used it can confirm that no organic chemistry laboratory is able to work efficiently without a rotovap. Just imagine an alternative way to distil off organic solvent – distillation at atmospheric pressure with boiling chips (boiling stones) or distillation in vacuum with capillary. Here is our rotovap equipped with the chiller to ensure complete recovery of solvent and vapor temperature sensor to prevent solvent over-boiling. Now concentration of a suspension of solid particles in organic solvents is not an issue!

More items are still to arrive.