Future tasks of electrochemical research
- PDF / 137,477 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 34 Downloads / 218 Views
FEATURE ARTICLE
Future tasks of electrochemical research Christopher M. A. Brett 1
&
Ana Maria Oliveira-Brett 1
Received: 31 May 2020 / Revised: 31 May 2020 / Accepted: 1 June 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
The world is facing many challenges in which we, as scientists, have an important role to contribute to solve and show that science, and particularly chemistry, is an important part of the solution. Electrochemistry, the combination of electrical and chemical phenomena, is at the heart of this and involves all chemical phenomena that concern charge transfer and charge separation, thus being intimately involved in many biological reactions and aspects of our everyday life, and in the making of many products that we use. However, the general public would say that they are unaware of most of this until we remind them of examples such as the batteries powering their cellular phone or laptop computers, or the glucose biosensors widely used by diabetics. Electrochemistry played a crucial role in the many scientific achievements of the nineteenth century, and in particular the discovery of the periodic system of elements. The scope of electrochemistry applications ranges from industrial electrolysis processes, coatings that are usually to protect against corrosion, solar energy conversion and energy storage, conducting polymers, electrochemical sensors and biosensors, and bioelectrochemistry. The conducting strand in the above is materials: new materials, or already-known materials but structured in a different way, or produced in different media such as ionic liquids or deep eutectic solvents. We now have tools available that are enabling us to control the nanostructure of electrodes, the shape of nanomaterials and the positioning of nanomaterials on electrode surfaces that all influence electrocatalysis. Exploiting this is probably the most important underlying task of electrochemistry in the future. Electrochemistry has an important part to play in addressing the challenges of climate change, the environment and sustainable development and health that need the
* Christopher M. A. Brett [email protected] 1
University of Coimbra, CEMMPRE, Department of Chemistry, 3004-535 Coimbra, Portugal
contributions from all branches of chemistry and other sciences. Electrochemical energy is a clean energy at the point of use: the energy of the electrons can be measured as well as controlled to introduce greater selectivity and yield. One of our challenges is therefore to make the source of electrons clean. This is being achieved and will continue through renewable energies such as wind energy and, more importantly, solar energy conversion, particularly photovoltaic cells. There is no doubt that this area will grow and power sources will become more efficient, which means new materials that enable higher energy densities. Linked to this are effective new methods for energy storage. A tremendous amount of effort is being devoted to developing energy storage such as with redox flow batteries
Data Loading...
