(Digital Presentation) Electrochemically Induced Sol-Gel Deposition

Abstract

Sol-gel electrochemistry has gained great popularity in the past decades, mostly because of the ease of formation of silica and organosilica films with tailor-made properties that can be advantageously exploited for several applications when coated on a suitable electrode surface. In particular, silica-based materials displaying a regular structure at the mesoporous level have been found to be very promising electrode modifiers [1-3] because they ensure fast mass transport processes [4], which are often rate-determining in electrochemistry. In this context, an original electrochemical method has been developed to indirectly generate sol-gel-derived (organo)silica thin films, with promising applications in the field of bioelectrochemistry and sensors and beyond. After a brief introduction to the field, this lecture will present the concept the electrochemically-assisted generation of sol-gel films [5], its interest for bioencapsulation and elaboration of electrochemical bioreactors [6-9], its suitability to get nanostructured electrode surfaces with preferential pore orientation [3,10,11], including their modification with organo-functional groups [3,12,13] and their permselective properties [14-16], and will end with promising applications in electroanalysis and sensors [17-20], electrocatalysis [20,21], energy storage [22] or electrochromism [23].