[bigfluffyz]

I have an unknown solid sample. Thus far the only thing that I've been able to do is a melting point analysis and it was >400 C. It is a very lustrius beautiful crystal. I'm thinking that it is ionic b/c of the melting point. My idea is to use various size known anions and cations to attempt to precipitate each ion with a known and then run a NMR or MS to determine the unknown anion and maybe AAS to determine the unknown metal. That's if it is ionic if it is a metal complex I was hoping to use correlated NMR. I'm going to be attempting this lab over the course of the next 4 weeks so any suggestions would be helpful.

There are no known properties of this compound and all instruments at my school are available (GC/MS, IR, UV-vis, flouresence, AAS, electrochem, NMR, melting point.... ask if you want to know if we have a certain instrument, and we have full access to the stock room).  Any thoughts

[macman104]

If it's a nice crystal, can you do crystallography?  How much do you have?

[Borek]

No decomposition at 400? Most likely inorganic. Soluble in water? pH of solution? Soluble in acid? Base?

No idea how much of the material you have, but to be cost effective you should try simple chemical tests to narrow your search before using heavy caliber equipment.

[bigfluffyz]

Yea I was assuming inorganic, going to run the basic tests on this coming tuesday I will post results. We don't have XRD