Best Practice for Evaluating Electrocatalysts for Hydrogen Economy.

Screening new electrocatalysts is key to the development of new materials for next-generation energy devices such as fuel cells and electrolyzers. The counter electrodes used in such tests are often made from materials such as Pt and Au, which can dissolve during testing and deposit onto test electrocatalysts, resulting in inaccurate results. The most common strategy for preventing this effect is to separate the counter electrode from the test material using an ion-transporting Nafion membrane.

Electroanalysis of Neutral Precursors in Protic Ionic Liquids and Synthesis of High-Ionicity Ionic Liquids.

Protic ionic liquids (PILs) are ionic liquids that are formed by transferring protons from Brønsted acids to Brønsted bases. While they nominally consist entirely of ions, PILs can often behave as though they contain a significant amount of neutral species (either molecules or ion clusters), and there is currently a lot of interest in determining the degree of "ionicity" of PILs. In this contribution, we describe a simple electroanalytical method for detecting and quantifying residual excess acids in a series of ammonium-based PILs (diethylmethylammonium triflate [dema][TfO], dimethylethylammonium triflate [dmea][TfO], triethylammonium trifluoroacetate [tea][TfAc], and dimethylbutylammonium triflate [dmba][TfO]).