Gastight Rotating Cylinder Electrode: Towards Decoupling Mass Transport
and Intrinsic Kinetics in Electrocatalysis
Abstract
Decoupling and understanding the various mass, charge and heat transport
phenomena involved in the electrocatalytic transformation of small
molecules (i.e. CO2, CO, H2, N2, NH3, O2, CH4) is challenging but it can
be readily achieved using dimensionless quantities (i.e. Reynolds,
Sherwood, Schmidt, Damköhler, Nusselt, Prandtl, and Peclet Numbers) to
simplify the characterization of systems with multiple interacting
physical phenomena. Herein we report the development of a gastight
rotating cylinder electrode cell with well-defined mass transport
characteristics that can be applied to experimentally decouple mass
transfer effects from intrinsic kinetics in electrocatalytic systems.
The gastight rotating cylinder electrode cell enables the dimensionless
analysis of electrocatalytic systems and should enable the rigorous
research and development of electrocatalytic technologies.