Subject Code/Name: CHM3911 â Advanced Physical Chemistry
Workload:
1 hr pre-recorded lectures (usually 1.5 hr)
1 x 2 hr workshop
1 x 4 hr lab
Assessment:
30% labs
10% midsem
10% comp chem assignment
10% wiki assignment
40% final exam
Recorded Lectures: Yes, with screen capture
Past exams available: Yes (2013 and 2014), no solutions provided
Textbook Recommendation: Donât remember and didnât get
Lecturer(s):
Rico Tabor
Katya Pas
Alison Funston (unit coordinator)
Year & Semester of completion: 2023 Sem 1
Rating: 4 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: 87 HD
Comments:
Overall impression and lecture content:
It goes without question that the hardest unit of any chem major is a phys chem one. CHM3911 is a unit that demands respect due to the conceptual difficulty and its insane workload. Before I did this unit, I was warned by previous students of it that it will take more time than all their other units combined during the semester. This was partially accurate, since 3911 took up more time than 3930 and MTH1020 combined, with only 3941 coming close. Although the official prereq of 3911 is 2922, I think 2922 alone is nowhere near enough preparation for 3911. Personally linalg/complex analysis should have been made prereqs otherwise you canât appreciate quantum chem to the fullest extent, but maybe doing that will cause enrolments to go down and the unit to be cancelled (there were only 39 people in the cohort this year which is low by chem unitsâ standards).
Rico has you for surface chem and colloids. This sub-branch of phys chem has never been taught to you in VCE or in previous phys chem units (1011/51 and 2922). What makes it particularly difficult isnât the maths, itâs the vast amount of surface/colloidal chem jargon. However, Rico did a great job at explaining them. Surface chem boils down to increasing surface area = not energetically favourable as surface molecules. Once I had this Eureka moment, everything was smooth sailing in this lecture block. I wouldâve preferred learning about colloids later on in the semester after thermodynamics because thermo serves as the basis behind surface chem.
Katya starts off with comp chem and these lectures are extremely scary. Thereâs a lot of multivariable calculus, linalg and complex analysis going on and my weak mathematical mind was overloaded within 1 minute of starting comp chem lectures (only did methods in year 12, plus MTH1020 which I was taking on the side). However, the assessments which Iâll detail below donât use any of these maths and are very qualitative. You only need to interpret the models on a qualitative level i.e. comp chem methods and their assumptions in terms of how molecular orbitals are filled. Her lectures continued with thermodynamics which was extremely interesting and useful for my other chem units since they conferred me this thermodynamic/energetic intuition that I didnât have in previous units since this aspect was omitted for the sake of simplicity. Again, the thermodynamics lectures had calculus in them, deriving stuff like equilibrium constant and the partition function/Boltzmann distribution from first principles. None of this was examinable, only simple algebraic derivations of enthalpy/entropy were. Towards the end of Katyaâs lectures, she talks a little about the Arrhenius equation and the interconnectivity between thermodynamics and kinetics. This is crucial to understand for any future chem teachers, so Iâd highly recommend 3911 to any future chem teachers because by the end of it, youâll gain a very deep and integrated understanding of the chem behind U3 and hence be able to teach it intuitively. Katya uses many effective analogies when explaining very abstract thermo content that I shall steal for when I become a chem teacher in around 2 yearâs time.
Alison has you for the last month of the semester for kinetics and phase equilibrium. While her explanations are clear 99%+ of the time, her lectures are in this weird format where a single 50 min lecture is split into 5 very short videos. It really disrupts the flow of info when a video ends and you have to open the next one. She said in a workshop that she did this on purpose because peopleâs attention spans have shortened courtesy of Tiktok. Content-wise, kinetics can be challenging for those with mathematical skill issue eg myself. You wonât be doing much real calculus since youâll just be equating the differential equations you come up with to different quantities/expressions depending on the assumption youâre using. Enzyme kinetics from biomed units make a comeback which made the lecture block slightly easier. Phase equilibrium is another concept that wasnât covered well in 1st year chem, but the way Alison explained it made it very easy to understand. Lots of graph reading and interpretation in this section as opposed to memorising theory.
Midsem: 50 minutes for 45 marks, iirc 10 marks came from MCQs of different weighting and 35 marks came from 5 extended calculation questions where you have to answer on paper. The actual exam was easier than the practice questions Rico supplied you and didnât examine much of the harder, more theoretical aspects of his lectures. However, the questions were of a different style to these practice questions. Many questions are just fancy geometry worded problems with a colloids background. Others are very plug and chuggable from the provided formula sheet, the only things you have to watch out for are the units. Colloidal/surface chem doesnât like using SI units for its quantities, it likes units like mN/m or mJ/m2 for surface tension. Since relevant densities are given to you in SI units, Iâd recommend converting everything into SI units so that you can use dimensional analysis. Scientific notation in calculations really come in clutch when you want to keep track of the units.
Lab: The lab program only ran in 9 out of 12 weeks and each lab is weighed by the number of weeks it lasted. The 3 wet labs last 2 weeks each, whereas comp chem ones only last one. For most labs there was a prelab quiz worth 5% of that particular lab. A little about each lab:
Surface tension: You investigate how surfactants affect surface tension measured using pendant drop tensiometry. Then in week 2, you have to design an experiment that compares the cost-effectiveness of two commercial detergents. To illustrate the insane workload of 3911, I never had to hand in anything late in 2 years of biomed but I had to hand in the surface tension report late because of the amount of jargon in surface chem literature. You have to learn 5 other pieces of jargon to define a jargon word and by the time you learned what the other jargon meant, you forgot why you were looking them up in the first place.
Kinetics: You use UV-Vis to monitor the kinetics of a photoactivated geometric isomerisation reaction. Then you have to use MATLAB to do some data fitting to calculate the rate constant from a version of the Arrhenius equation. In week 2, youâre asked to investigate the use of photosensitive dyes for banknote security features. My group decided to investigate how solvent polarity affects isomerisation rate because thatâs the easiest experiment to do.
Colloids: You investigate the effects of pH and salt concentration (separately) on Fe(OH)3 colloidal stability. Then in week 2, youâre asked to design your own experiment to investigate how to destabilise a colloidal dispersion of bentonite in water. Hint: donât do pH because itâs a massive pain as you have to constantly monitor it with a pH meter so that you donât overshoot. Do salt and polymer concentration if you want to take things easy.
Comp chem labs: You go on a Zoom meeting where TAs walk you through answers to a Moodle quiz. You donât actually use the supercomputers to calculate the values yourself, it has already been done for you and the output files are saved onto a location on the Monash server that you can access. I can describe these labs as Excel spam, because youâll be using a spreadsheet to calculate different values all the time.
Comp chem assignment: This assignment has 6 topics on offer and you had to allocate yourself to one by a certain date, after which Katya will give you a random topic. To help you choose which topic to do, they have recorded short videos on each topic and whatâs required in the report to score well. The assignment had a 1200 word limit, but this wasnât enforced (I wrote 1900). Katya said âAs long as you donât write 20 pages I wonât count each wordâ.
Hint: do topic 4 (RAFT polymerisation) because although the introductory video makes it seem like itâs a lot of calculations and a lot of work, after you work through the Excel spam, interpretation of the data is super easy as literature is everywhere for this topic and the comp chem methods involved. I only had to compare 3 comp chem methods including the benchmark one, whereas I heard for other peopleâs topics they had to compare 24 because they had to investigate different methodologies combined with different basis sets. I was slightly hesitant to choose topic 4 at first because Katya did a post-doc thesis on it which means Iâll get caught out on inaccuracies in the report. However, she marked mine very leniently. Legit I got 100 on the report by following the video, she said it was the best comp chem assignment she has marked in over a decade. So take-home message, all you have to do is follow the darn video (excuse the GTA SA reference).
Wiki assignment: Youâre randomly allocated a phys chem topic based on your lab group code and asked to do a group project on it. Your task is to create a wiki page on your allocated topic in the style of a Wikipedia article. There are 3 sections, introduction (500 word limit), physical derivation of the phenomenon (500 word limit) and problems + worked solutions (no word limit). The assignment was split into group and individual components, the introduction, physical derivations and referencing sections are assessed as a group and are worth 40% of the project. The problems and worked solutions section (worth 60% of the assignment) requires you to write 3 problems relevant to your assigned topic of increasing difficulty complete with worked solutions. The assignment is very easy to do well in if you use your time wisely and it was marked very leniently. However, there was some drama with the Moodle wiki page randomly deleting peopleâs images and replacing it with a blank box. Since I relied heavily on these to explain, it was kinda annoying to have to convert everything I wrote/drew into text. It was a common issue among the cohort so I emailed Rico a screenshot of how my wiki page was supposed to look like and that was an acceptable failsafe in case the wiki deletes my images again.
Final exam: 130 minutes for 120 marks, divided as follows: thermodynamics (60 marks), kinetics (32 marks) and phase equilibria (18 marks). THE. SINGLE. MOST. REVOLTING. EXAM. IâVE. SAT. Hereâs a rough depiction of pretty much every question in the thermodynamics section:
Parts a and b: Something youâve done before in the workshop problem sets, except on the difficult side
Part c (worth as much as parts a and b combined): SIKE something youâve never seen before
The kinetics section wasnât much better, pretty much all kinetics questions were harder than the ones on the problem set. Very error-prone and very time-consuming to do, expect to spend 1.5 min per mark on this section even though the time limit recommends a mark a minute.
The phase equilibrium questions were surprisingly easy. They were similar to the problem set questions youâre given and you can probably finish them in 10 minutes. Shame that this section was worth so little on the exam.
Iâll admit that a large part of the examâs difficulty was attributable to my own skill issues. Since the green scientific calculator was clunky, I used Desmos on my phone for practice questions which was a big no-no since the actual scientific calculator requires you to enter all brackets otherwise it gives a syntax error, whereas Desmos does it for you automatically. In the end, I donât think I got above 60%, but they scaled my exam to 91/120 (76%) after back-calculating from my final grade.
