A short introduction to digital simulations in electrochemistry: simulating the Cottrell experiment in NI LabVIEW

Soma Vesztergom

doi:10.5599/jese.507

Abstract

A brief introduction to the use of digital simulations in electrochemistry is given by a detailed description of the simulation of Cottrell’s experiment in the LabVIEW programming language. A step-by-step approach is followed and different simulation techniques (explicit and implicit Euler, Runge–Kutta and Crank–Nicolson methods) are applied. The applied techniques are introduced and discussed on the basis of Padé approximants. The paper might be found useful by undergraduate and graduate students familiarizing themselves with the digital simulation of electrochemical problems, as well as by university lecturers involved with the teaching of theoretical electrochemistry.

Highlights

At the 6th Regional Symposium on Electrochemistry for South-East Europe (6th RSE–SEE), I gave a keynote lecture [1] on the kinetics of hydrogen evolution in mildly acidic solutions
Summary In this paper I attempted to describe numerical methods used for the digital simulation of a rather simple, instructive electrochemical problem, Cotrell’s experiment
The described simulation strategies may be extended to take into account homogeneous reactions [12], or effects related to ohmic drop [13,14]

Summary

Introduction

At the 6th Regional Symposium on Electrochemistry for South-East Europe (6th RSE–SEE), I gave a keynote lecture [1] on the kinetics of hydrogen evolution in mildly acidic solutions. Each i entry of the array c (the index i can take values between 0 and n – 1 in LabVIEW) corresponds to the concentration of the species R at a certain distance from the electrode surface, as shown by Figure 2. To understand the role of the stepper matrix S in digital simulations, let us consider Figure 2, and assume that in each control volume shown, the concentration values are different.

Results

Conclusion