Solid-state electrochemistry kinetics, process

The opening chapter of this Handbook highlights the characteristic features of solid-state electrochemistry, including basic phenomena, measurement techniques, and key apphcations. Materials research strategies that are based on electrochemical insight and the potential of nanostructuring are detailed in particular. Fundamental relationships between the decisive thermodynamic and kinetic parameters governing electrochemical processes are also briefly discussed. 

Solid-state electrochemistry is an important and rapidly developing scientific field that integrates many aspects of classical electrochemical science and engineering, materials science, solid-state chemistry and physics, heterogeneous catalysis, and other areas of physical chemistry. This field comprises - but is not limited to - the electrochemistry of solid materials, the thermodynamics and kinetics of electrochemical reactions involving at least one solid phase, and also the transport of ions and electrons in solids and interactions between solid, liquid and/or gaseous phases, whenever these processes are essentially determined by the properties of solids and are relevant to the electrochemical reactions. The range of applications includes many types of batteries and fuel cells, a variety of sensors and analytical appliances, electrochemical pumps and compressors, ceramic membranes with ionic or mixed ionic-electronic conductivity, solid-state electrolyzers and electrocatalytic reactors, the synthesis of new materials with improved properties and corrosion protection, supercapacitors, and electrochromic and memory devices. 

Interface and colloid science has a very wide scope and depends on many branches of the physical sciences, including thermodynamics, kinetics, electrolyte and electrochemistry, and solid state chemistry. Throughout, this book explores one fundamental mechanism, the interaction of solutes with solid surfaces (adsorption and desorption). This interaction is characterized in terms of the chemical and physical properties of water, the solute, and the sorbent. Two basic processes in the reaction of solutes with natural surfaces are 1) the formation of coordinative bonds (surface complexation), and 2) hydrophobic adsorption, driven by the incompatibility of the nonpolar compounds with water (and not by the attraction of the compounds to the particulate surface). Both processes need to be understood to explain many processes in natural systems and to derive rate laws for geochemical processes. 

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