TECHNOLOGY USED

1. COMPUTER HARDWARE

1.1 For the main document processing

This document was written on an Acorn RiscPC700 computer and printed on a Canon BJC-4100 colour bubble jet printer.

 

1.2 Glass Bomb Calorimetry, IR and UV/VIS

All hardware used was based in the Physical Chemistry teaching laboratory at the University of Salford Department of Chemistry and Applied Chemistry.

 

1.2.1 IR Spectroscopy

This was performed on a Mattson FTIR connected to an Elonex 486 50MHz PC and plotted on a Hewlett Packard desktop plotter.

Subsequent scanning to computer performed using a PlusTek 4830 30bit scanner connected to the Acorn RiscPC700, using !ImageMaster by David Pilling.

 

1.2.2 UV/VIS Spectroscopy

This was performed on a Hewlett Packard UV/VIS spectrometer connected to a HP 286 PC. The output file was converted to a Comma Separated Value file using an application I wrote called CSVConvert

 

1.2.3 Bomb Calorimetry

Performed using a bead thermistor connected to a Viglen 486-33MHz PC. The controller software was written by Dr. J. Arotsky using Microsoft Visual Basic

 

2. NON COMPUTER HARDWARE

2.1 X-Ray Diffraction

This was performed in the X Ray Diffraction laboratory at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Chemistry, University of Salford.

The machine used was a Siemens D5000 powder diffraction XRD.

 

3. COMPUTER SOFTWARE

3.1 Main document

The main document was written using TechWriter Pro (v4.05) by Icon Technology.

Diagrams were created using Draw (v1.09) by Acorn Computers with the IR Scans being edited using Paint (v1.94) by Acorn Computers. The sprite files were converted to vector files (for further cleaning) using David Pilling's Trace (v2.12) package. Conversion to png in 2003 using ImageMagick (Linux)

All spreadsheets were created by PipeDream4 (v4.13) by Colton Software. The graphs created were edited using Draw by Acorn Computers.

The printer driver is part of Printers (v1.53) by Acorn Computers.

The diagrams used on the front cover and numbers (4) and (5) in the theory were created using Mole (v2.05) by Simon Kilvington. This package is freely available from the Higher Education National Software Archive (HENSA)

The ellipsoid diagram was created using the Acorn version of ORTEP 3 by Kate Crennell of Fortran Friends (also from HENSA).

 

3.2 HTML

The original HTML code was created using !TechWriterPro v4.05 from Icon Technology. Clean up and editting (2003), Bluefish

The finished document was tested using !ArcWeb 1.91, !Webite and !Browse (Acorn web viewers) and Netscape Gold 3.01 (PC and Apple Mac) and Netscape 1.2 (on the PC). Any changes were made using !Zap while testing the document at home.

All of the Acorn software is freely available from HENSA (though !Creator is shareware) with the exception of CSVConvert, ImageMaster and TechWriterPro. CSVConvert has not been released at the time of writing, TechWriterPro and ImageMaster are commercial pieces of software.