The Scope and History of Electrochemical Engineering

Abstract

The Scope of Electrochemical Engineering was the title of a contribution of Carl Wagner in the second volume of Advances in Electrochemistry and Electrochemical Engineering in 1962. On ten pages he described some examples of his own work on particular topics in electrochemical engineering science [1]. Typical for the situation in electrochemical engineering science at that time was that he concentrated mainly on questions of mass transfer by convective diffusion on one hand and on current-density distributions on electrodes on the other hand. Also typical for the prevailing situation at that time and even more typical for his personality was his methodical approach. Carl Wagner was — compared to other physicochemists and even more compared to average chemists of this time — obsessed by mathematics. He was never content with only formulating the problem under consideration exactly and well founded by the respective set of differential equations. He was satisfied only if — at least for some well defined borderline cases — a closed solution could be found for the problem. In that way he even treated relatively complicated problems as for instance the onset of free convection driven by small density differences of the electrolyte at copper anodes and cathodes of copper refining electrolysis cells and its influence on steady state mass transfer at these electrodes.