Electrode And Corrosion Physics

The global cost of corrosion was said to be two and a half trillion dollars or 3.4% of global GDP in 2013. Electrochemistry as a discipline is of even greater relevance ten years on, in view of the world's desperate attempts to prevent catastrophic climate change by moving from fossil fuel to 'e-mobility' among other measures. This means that even if electrochemistry in all its mysteries and complexity was the domain of the physical chemist alone, today it is an essential skill for the materials scientist, the engineer, and indeed the physicist.This textbook fills a current research gap, providing a course of learning from first principles for the student, researcher and industrialist who has an undergraduate level education in physics, but only high school chemistry. To some extent the text is built around the lemon lamp, which every reader may construct for themselves at home.The reader is then taken through simple electrochemical cells and the rigorous description of the many confusing 'potentials' that arise across its interfaces, to what can and cannot be measured in an experiment. The first three quarters of the book are rather general, highlights being the electrochemical series and the Nernst and Butler-Volmer equations. This all lies at the heart of the science of corrosion, fuel cells and batteries. The last quarter of the book however concerns corrosion only and uses the thermodynamic and kinetic foundation established for the reader to develop in clear terms the two principal tools of the corrosion scientist and engineer: the Evans and Pourbaix diagrams.