The environmental and economic impact of relying heavily on fossil fuels has never been more apparent than in the last several years. Teaching labs should reflect the time period and the scientific concerns relevant to the lives of their students. Presented here is a simple synthetic laboratory that requires the student to find a general synthetic method to make biodiesel (fuel made from clean sources such as vegetable oils) and assess its viscosity versus temperature. The lab is run in the context of answering a fictitious inquiry from the National Park Service (NPS) and, as much as possible, the procedures and interpretations are developed by the students. The students are then instructed to write a memo that responds to the NPS inquiry and includes their synthetic details and a detailed interpretation of their viscosity data. This lab has been used with the general chemistry laboratory (16–24 students) at the end of the first semester when organic chemistry is discussed or at the beginning of the second semester after the properties of liquids are discussed. The synthesis and the viscosity experiments take two three-hour laboratory periods.
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Clarke et al. (2006) studied this question.