Integrating Chemistry Laboratory Instrumentation into the Industrial Internet: Building, Programming, and Experimenting with an Automatic Titrator

TLDR

This project aims to enhance undergraduate physical chemistry and instrumental analysis courses by using novel electronics and industrial‑Internet data integration as teaching tools. Students learn to build, calibrate, and program an automatic titrator with an open‑source microcontroller and standard pH probes, and to integrate the device—and other instruments such as temperature, pressure, and salinity probes—into the industrial Internet, with all hardware and software openly available for community modification. Upper‑division undergraduates successfully completed the project, demonstrating its feasibility.

Abstract

This project is designed to improve physical chemistry and instrumental analysis laboratory courses for undergraduate students by employing as teaching tools novel technologies in electronics and data integration using the industrial Internet. The project carried out by upper-division undergraduates is described. Students are exposed to a complete process of building, calibrating, and programming an automatic titrator using an open-source microcontroller platform and standard pH probes, and integrating the instrument into the Internet. The approach is flexible and can be used to enable integration of various laboratory instruments (e.g., temperature, pressure, salinity probes, etc.) into the industrial Internet. The hardware and software are open-source, which makes further modification and development by the academic community possible.