electrochemical processes

The Story

When my undergraduate mentor, Ernest Lyons, Jr., introduced me to electrochemistry, I was hooked. It combined my two loves, electronics and chemistry. I had to know more. Dr. Lyons had worked in the electroplating industry, and he gave me the challenge to find a way to plate titanium. I was never completely successful, but it set my course for graduate school.

My interests in electrochemistry were never so much in the application as in the process, and Herbert Laitinen, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, turned out to be the ideal graduate advisor for me. He gave me the project of learning about the electrolytic formation of an oxide layer that occurred at platinum electrodes. The category picture is my home-built thesis apparatus.

I continued these studies during my first few years as a fresh academic, but soon switched to studying the rates of rapid electrochemical reactions. My electronics background gave me an edge in these studies, achieving the measurement of some of the fastest rates.

Amazingly, my thesis paper is still being cited, largely, I believe, due to the interest in the properties of platinum in hydrogen fuel cells, and as cathodes in the production of hydrogen from water. The reference electrode I developed, based on the diffusion of hydrogen through palladium, gathered special interest during the excitement over cold fusion and the measurement of ferri-ferrocyanide electron exchange at a platinum electrode is suddenly of interest as a cell to convert heat into a source of electrical current.

Publications in Electrochemical Processes

My collaborators in this work were Herbert Laitinen, Clark Bricker, Stephen Feldberg, Louis Ramaley, Ronald Brubaker, Mark Salomon, Brian Conway, G. Daniel Robbins, William Weir, Peter Daum, Janet Kudirka, and James Holler.

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Electroanalytical Chemistry