Slobodan Petrovic - Electrochemistry Crash Course for Engineers

Cover Illustration credit: Kevin Hudson

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The field of renewable energy is extremely diverse and multidisciplinary. The individual renewable energy technologies are enabled by many other technologies and areas of science. One of the most critical enabling areas is electrochemistry, the interfacial science that studies the intersection between chemistry and electricity. Knowledge of electrochemistry is necessary to understand and design energy storage systems, batteries, fuel cells, electrochemical supercapacitors, and hydrogen technologies. Electrochemical principles are also important for understanding mechanisms in solar photovoltaic devices. Additionally, corrosion and electrochemical sensing control systems play an important role in all aspects of integrated system design.

Electrochemistry is one of the most important sciences in our present-day economy. It provides a basis for significant processes such as those in primary and secondary batteries and fuel cells; the production of chlorine and caustic soda; electrowinning of metals, electroplating, electromachining; the study and prevention of corrosion; and numerous types of sensors and electroanalysis. In the USA, the electrochemical technologies contribute with 1.6% of all manufacturing and comprise roughly one third of the entire chemical industry. This makes electrochemistry a very significant area of science intersecting with technology!

The goal of this book is to provide the theoretical foundation and to teach the principles of electrochemistry, but it will ultimately present the behavior of electrochemical systems from a practical point of view. The approach will, therefore, not involve details of the microscopic phenomena nor derivations of critical laws and formulas. Instead, the focus will be to provide skills to evaluate and design electrochemical systems and to test the behavior of electrodes to be used in those systems.

The fundamental areas covered are basic electrode behavior, thermodynamics, electrode kinetics, and transport phenomena. An attempt is made to explain these concepts and illuminate them sufficiently for the subsequent determination of the behavior of electrochemical systems. In the second part of the book, practical electrochemical systems will be evaluated: industrial electrolytic processes, galvanic cells, analytic applications, and corrosion.

The fascination with electrochemical systems is in the complexity of phenomena that influence them and the exhilaration of mastering one of the most difficult fields of study in all of science.

This book is intended for renewable energy engineering students, but it can provide an introduction into electrochemistry for students from other disciplines as well. A background in calculus and the completion of a second-year college chemistry course with a lab component is expected.

My thanks to Laura Polk for her assistance with getting this book to the publisher on time and to Justin Ringle for his help.

The Volta battery was used a few years later as a source of electricity to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen. This milestone in chemistry illuminated the discovery that hydrogen and oxygen atoms are associated with positive and negative electrical charges that are responsible for the bonding forces between them. Berzelius , a Swedish scientist, proposed in 1812 that all atoms are electrified, for example, hydrogen and metals are positive and nonmetals are negative. When electricity is applied to two electrodes immersed in a solution it provides energy to break up the attraction forces and form ions. The word ion comes from the Greek word for traveler. The Berzelius view was ultimately replaced by the Lewis theory of bonding through shared electrons, but it represents an important progress milestone in understanding chemical bonding.

The use of newly discovered electrochemical principles continued to attract new ideas and Humphrey Davey showed that elemental sodium can be produced by the electrolysis of sodium hydroxide melt. Daveys former assistant Michael Faraday made significant contributions to understanding electrochemical processes by establishing the relationship between the amount of electrical charge passed through the solution and the quantity of substance reacted or produced. These are known as Faradays Laws of Electrolysis .