electrochemistry

A portrait of the English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday. He began his working life apprenticed to a bookbinder, but at the age of 21 he started researching electricity. He took a job at the Royal Institution of Great Britain a year later, and by 1833 had succeeded Humphry Davy as professor of chemistry there. He is regarded as the founder of electrochemistry.

Branch of science that studies chemical reactions involving electricity. The use of electricity to produce chemical effects, electrolysis, is employed in many industrial processes, such as electroplating, the manufacture of chlorine, and the extraction of aluminium. The use of chemical reactions to produce electricity is the basis of electrical cells, such as the dry cell and the Leclanché cell.

Since all chemical reactions involve changes to the electronic structure of atoms, all reactions are now recognized as electrochemical in nature. Oxidation, for example, was once defined as a process in which oxygen was combined with a substance, or hydrogen was removed from a compound; it is now defined as a process in which electrons are lost.

Electrochemistry is also the basis of new methods of destroying toxic organic pollutants. For example, electrochemical cells that operate with supercritical water (a type of supercritical fluid) have been developed to combust organic waste materials.