Energies of Activation of Electrode Reactions: A Revisited Problem

A century has passed since Roszkowsky in 1894 indicated in Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie that the electrode potential of the hydrogen evolution reaction, taken at constant current density, is affected by temperature.1 His paper was the first report on the effect of temperature on the kinetics of electrode reactions. During the next half century after the publication of Roszkowsky’s paper, however, studies of temperature effects in electrode kinetics were scarce and involved mostly determinations of temperature coefficients of the potential or overpotential for a few electrode reactions.2-18