Electrochemical Methods for Catalyst Activity Evaluation

Since a fuel cell is an electrochemical device, electrochemical methods are deemed to play important roles in characterizing and evaluating the cell and its components such as the electrode, the membrane, and the catalyst. The most popular electrochemical characterization methods include potential step, potential sweep, potential cycling, rotating disk electrode, rotating ring-disk electrode, and impedance spectroscopy. Some techniques derived from these methods are also used for fuel cell characterization.

An electrochemical reaction involves at least the following steps: transport of the reactants to the surface of the electrode, adsorption of the reactants onto the surface of the electrode, charge transfer through either oxidation or reduction on the surface of the electrode, and transport of the product(s) from the surface of the electrode. The purpose of the electrochemical characterizations is to determine the details of these steps.