Oxygen reduction reaction intermediates adsorption

Hyman MP, Medlin JW (2007) Effects of electronic stmeture modifications on the adsorption of oxygen reduction reaction intermediates on model Pt(l 1 l)-alloy surfaces. J Phys Chem C 111(45) 17052-17060... 

More recently, Wang et al. [28] derived an intrinsic kinetic equation for the four-electron (4e ) oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in acidic media, by using free energies of activation and adsorption as the kinetic parameters, which were obtained through fitting experimental ORR data from a Pt(lll) rotating disk electrode (RDE). Their kinetic model consists of four essential elementary reactions (1) a dissociative adsorption (DA) (2) a reductive adsorption (RA), which yields two reaction intermediates, O and OH (3) a reductive transition (RT) from O to OH and (4) a reductive desorption (RD) of OH, as shown below [28] (Reproduced with permission from [28]). 

Nowadays, it has been demonstrated that the reaction is indeed structure sensitive with a multielectron transfer process that involves several steps and the possible existence of several adsorption intermediates [93-96]. The main advantage that we have with the new procedures with respect to cleanliness is that we have well-ordered surfaces to study a complex mechanism such as the oxygen electroreduction reaction [96-99]. In aqueous solutions, the four-electron oxygen reduction appears to occur by two overall pathways a direct four-electron reduction and a peroxide pathway. The latter pathway involves hydrogen peroxide as an intermediate and can undergo either further reduction or decomposition in acid solutions to yield water as the final product. This type of generic model of a reaction has been extensively studied since the early 1960s by different authors [100-108]. 

Many reactions of industrial importance are electrocatalytic, i.e., they involve the specific adsorption of intermediates, for example hydrogen, chlorine, and oxygen evolution, oxygen reduction, and methanol or ethanol oxidation in fuel cells. Many different electrochemical techniques were used to study these reactions, and EIS is one of them, providing interesting kinetic and surface information. Certain model reactions will be presented in what follows with a detailed method of relating impedance parameters with mechanistic and kinetic equations. 

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