Measuring Electrocatalysis Numerically

FIGURE 1.7 Tafel lines for a simple organic oxidation process comparing platinum with a better electrocatalyst A. 

One has also to keep the same temperatures in comparing electrocatalysis and although this is obvious, it sometimes turns out that a desired reaction is only viable at a lower rather than at room temperature. An example would be the work of Hori on the reduction of carbon dioxide. He found 

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There are numerous reports of the existence of electrocatalysis via an attached redox center on a SAM (see Sect. 4.3), but few reports in which the rates of electron transfer between the electrode and the attached redox molecule and between the attached redox molecule and the solution redox molecule are measured. It would be interesting to study the electron-transfer kinetics in SAMs with multiple redox molecules linked along a single tether (such as porphyrins [157] or metal-terpyridine complexes) [122]. From such a system, one could derive the rate of electron transfer between two redox molecules connected by a molecular bridge and check the considerable data available on intramolecular transfer obtained by other methods [254]. For a variety of applications, measurements of the rates of electron transfer between an electrode and metal nanoparticles tethered to the SAM are also of interest [255]. 

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