Electroless deposition of tellurium nanowires in eutectic solvents using immobilised silver islands.

In this work we demonstrate a new approach towards the electroless deposition of tellurium nanowires in deep eutectic solvents. Unlike most electroless deposition where the substrate is sacrificed to drive the reduction, our process uses immobilised silver epoxy islands on gold films to give localised galvanic displacement of the silver, resulting in an even growth of wires across the entire gold electrode surface. We demonstrate the strong dependence of the nanostructure on the experimental conditions, with changes in bath temperature, tellurium concentration and the halide component of the solvent leading to sizeable alterations in the nanowire geometry.

Hydrophobic thiol coatings to facilitate a triphasic interface for carbon dioxide reduction to ethylene at gas diffusion electrodes.

The electrochemical reduction of CO2 continues to see significant interest as a viable means of both producing important chemical materials and lowering carbon emissions. The primary challenge to making this process economically viable is the design of catalyst, electrode and reactor components that can selectively produce just one of the many possible CO2 reduction products. In this work, we report the use of hydrophobic 1-octadecanethiol coatings at copper coated gas diffusion electrodes to enhance the production of ethylene.

Polymers with intrinsic microporosity (PIMs) for targeted CO reduction to ethylene.

CO reduction offers an attractive alternative green synthetic route for ethylene, especially where CO could be sourced from industrial exhausts and in combination with green power sources. However, practical applications are currently limited due to the unfortunately low selectivity of cathode materials towards ethylene. This work uses polymers with intrinsic microporosity (PIMs) to improve the performance of copper gas diffusion electrodes for CO reduction to ethylene.

Simultaneous Electrochemical and Emission Monitoring of Electrogenerated Chemiluminescence through Instrument Hyphenation.

One of the long-standing challenges to performing electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL) research is the need for dedicated instrumentation or highly customized cells to achieve reproducibility. This manuscript describes an approach to designing ECL systems through the hyphenation of existing laboratory instruments, which provide innate time correlation of electrochemical and emission data. This design methodology lowers the entry barrier required to obtaining reproducible ECL measurements and provides flexibility in the scope of applications.

Combined Spectroelectrochemical and Simulated Insights into the Electrogenerated Chemiluminescence Coreactant Mechanism.

Electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL) based sensors have the intrinsic advantage of having zero theoretical background signal, derived from the electrochemical initiation of the luminescence process. Since the limit of detection (LOD) for sensors is defined as three times the noise of the background over the sensitivity of the system, further improvement to an ECL based detection limit is tied to improving sensitivity. Enhancing ECL sensitivity can be achieved through optimizing the mechanistic or kinetic performance of the reagents.

Sampled-current voltammetry at microdisk electrodes: kinetic information from pseudo steady state voltammograms.

In sampled-current voltammetry (SCV), current transients acquired after stepping the potential along the redox wave of interest are sampled at a fixed time to produce a sigmoidal current-potential curve akin to a pseudo steady state voltammogram. Repeating the sampling for different times yields a family of sampled-current voltammograms, one for each time scale. The concept has been used to describe the current-time-potential relationship at planar electrodes but rarely employed as an electroanalytical method except in normal pulse voltammetry where the chronoamperograms are sampled once to produce a single voltammogram.