The UT-Austin NMR facility was created in the late 1970's by the Department of Chemistry.  It remains an integral part of the department today, and has expanded to serves ~50 research groups across the UT-Austin colleges of Natural Science, Pharmacy and Engineering.  The principal investigators of these groups direct projects which rely explicitly on the NMR facility and collectively value >$55M in federal funding.  The facility logs well over 17,000 hours of trackable instrument usage annually across its fleet of eight NMR spectrometers.  

The facility occupies two rooms in the Norman Hackerman Building (NHB) that are open access 24x7.  The Chemistry Department employs two full-time spectroscopists who's job is to maintain the facility and to support/provide NMR services for research programs.  Person-to-person training is provided for those who wish to operate independently;  and Just-In-Time (JIT) assistance at the spectrometer is available during working hours (~8-6 M-F).  A limited amount of time is formally aliquoted to NMR staff for running samples by request for special projects.  

Equipment

The main lab located in the basement of NHB (0.230) has five instruments and is located on the basement floor;  a smaller room with three instruments is located on the fifth floor of NHB (5.342).   Six of the eight spectrometers in total  are open-access, (evenly split between the rooms) and available a-round-the-clock to students, staff and faculty.  Their primary role is to provide routine NMR analysis of chemical compounds and are setup for easy use with only a modest amount of training.  Several levels of automation provide easy access to multinuclear NMR and unattended multi-sample analysis.      

Three open access spectrometers in the fifth-floor lab are set up for single sample submission.  Time slots from 10-40 minutes may be reserved during primetime (~8-6 M-F).   On-line booking (NMRCalendar) of these time slots facilitates organized and efficient turn-over throughout the day.  

Two open access spectrometers in the basement lab have automation hardware to move NMR samples into and out of the instrument.  This allows users to drop-off of multiple samples in a carrousel by the magnet, setup their experiments and go back to their labs without waiting for the runs to complete.  One more single-sample spectrometer in the basement rounds out the selection of open access instruments.    

The last two spectrometers in the basement lab are mostly reserved for samples run by NMR staff.   There is a dedicated solids NMR spectrometer with a 4mm broadband CPMAS probe.  This system is also equipped with a high-power gradient amplifier and probe for performing NMR based diffusion studies on very large molecules or polymers.   There is a  a 600 MHz three channel liquids system, which is also used primarily by NMR staff to fulfill experiment requests for variable temperature or extremely long data collection requests.   High-field, solids and diffusion NMR may be requested by filling out the appropriate request form.

All NMR data acquired in the facility are automatically copied and stored in a shared on-line cloud storage resource (Box).  Users are expected to limit their data processing at the spectrometer console to a minimum and to process, analyze and print their spectral data off-line. For this purpose, the department of chemistry maintains a site-wide license for the NMR processing software Mnova.  

Costs

NMR RATES 2024

$10/hr. - M-F 9am-6pm (daily prime time)

$7.50/hr. - M-Th - 6pm-9am & F 6pm-M 9am (nights and weekends)

$15/hr. - staff run (service requests)

$60/hr. - External requests

Note: External requests will also have a 26.5% surcharge applied to the total bill.  This fee covers overhead charges by the University.

--Hourly NMR rates have a $10/mo. minimum

Instrument time is measured by accounting logs maintained on each spectrometer console computer.   Login or acquisition times are used whichever is longer.   Principal Investigator's are billed monthly via internal business offices.   Charges are intended to offset operating costs of the facility and may change accordingly.  

Services

Initial Training

Training is free and all users are required to go through an introductory training session regardless of background.   This training provides the basic details and information required for login, routine data collection on proton and carbon, scheduling, and lab etiquette. 

Just-in-time support

NMR's can be troublesome, often requiring various levels of system resets.   Common problems are sometimes documented, others are not.   NMR staff have their "offices" in the lab to be there for "Just-in-time" instrument support during week days.  Users are encouraged to seek help with any minor (or major) problem they encounter while using an instrument. 

Advanced training

Additional training on advanced techniques, data optimization via acquisition and processing may be requested and fulfilled informally and formally depending on requirements.  

Staff assisted measurements

Sometimes the best training comes from a little help running something new.   Feel free to schedule some instrument time with a staff member.   

Staff run NMR

The facility can handle a limited amount of "service" NMR wherein prepared samples may be dropped off for analysis.  Typically these requests fall into the following categories; 

• solid state nmr
• advanced 1D or 2D measurements when sample concentration is too low for routine setup.
• variable temperature 
• Very long acquisition times >>12 or >24 hours
• one-offs wherein only one or two NMR’s are required for a project and no-one in the group is trained.    

Processing and analysis

Routine spectra on normally concentrated samples respond predictably to standard processing techniques (usually saved as processing scripts and automatically applied).   But sometimes the information desired from a dataset is not easily extracted.   There are many tricks and tips to working with NMR data that can improve the information available.  Users are encouraged to ask for assistance when having difficulty.   

Welcome to the UT NMR facility and feel free to come by and chat if you have any particular concerns or questions regarding NMR.