Field of Expertise: Advanced Material Science

ELECTROACOUSTIC IMPEDANCE MEASUREMENTS OF ELECTRODEPOSITION FROM HIGHLY VISCOUS LIQUIDS
Daniel Schloffer and Bernhard Gollas
Institute for Chemistry and Technology of Materials, Graz University of Technology
15:20 - 17:30 Thursday 24 October 2013 Foyer Alte Technik

The electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance (EQCM) has been used to investigate interfacial processes at the electrode surface in liquids [1,2]. By means of measuring of the transfer function of the thickness-shear mode resonator and fitting to the modified Butterworth-Van Dyke (BVD) equivalent circuit model, it is possible to obtain information on mass changes of the electrode and the properties of the liquid [3,4].
We present a measurement system to study electrodeposition from highly viscous electrolytes such as ionic liquids. The system consists of a voltage-controlled oscillator circuit with an AT-cut 10 MHz quartz crystal as part of a complex voltage divider. The circuit is connected through an accessory with BNC-style connectors to a DAQ board from National Instruments. The software for acquisition is written in LabVIEW. The nonlinear data fit is written in Matlab.

_____________________________________________________________________________
1. D. A. Buttry and M. D. Ward, Chem. Rev., 92, 6, 1355-1379 (1992).
2. R. Schumacher, Angew. Chem., 102, 4, 347-460 (1990).
3. E. J. Calvo, R. Etchenique, P. N. Bartlett, K. Singhal, C. Santamaria, Faraday Discuss., 107,
141-157 (1997).
4. B. Gollas, J. M. Elliott and P. N. Bartlett, Electrochim. Acta., 45, 3711-3724 (2000).