The outbreak of the COVID-19 during 2020 obligated many colleges and universities campi worldwide to remain closed for an extended period. Consequently, most of the higher-education instruction had to change to a remote setting. The impossibility of performing experiments had to be somehow amended to provide the students with a similar data analysis experience as they would have in a regular lab course. Materials chemistry courses, experiments, and activities in undergraduate education are essential to introduce the science and engineering students to the chemical and physical concepts related to the solid-state and how they are entailed to the structure, property, performance, characterization, and application of materials. One important characterization technique studied in materials science courses is the X-ray diffraction (XRD). XRD is a technique used to determine, firstly, whether a solid material is crystalline or not. Then, specifically for crystalline materials, this technique allows one to verify the type of crystalline structure present in that specific material. In this sense, this research describes the development of a set of three experiments that could be performed and accomplished remotely for materials science lab courses or upper-level lab courses in chemistry, such as inorganic and physical chemistry lab courses. The first experiment is about the calculation of periodic properties of metallic elements with a body-centered cubic (BCC) structure. The second experiment is about the calculation of lattice parameters, axial ratios, unit cell volumes, and densities of yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) solid solutions. The third experiment is about applying the Rietveld refinement technique to distinguish the enantiomers of the pharmaceutical molecule naproxen and determine the hydration degree of commercial naproxen sodium pills. For the first two experiments, students worked with simulated data, whereas for the third one, they worked with experimental data collected and provided by the Instructor. Besides the materials science and XRD concepts, students were introduced to the operation of the free softwares Vesta and GSAS II and to the Crystallography Open Database, a free database for structural data of organic and inorganic compounds. To help the students and instructors willing to implement these experiments, a series of instructional videos were recorded and made freely available on youtube.

Development and implementation of three remote experiments about materials chemistry during the COVID-19 outbreak

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