A PRACTICAL APPROACH FOR SENSING SURFACE NANOSTRUCTURES IN ELECTROCHEMICAL EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

Fractal analysis of electrode surfaces by means of electrochemical techniques is an efficient tool to reveal surface structures via a geometrical model. Since this is based on the concept of "diffusion toward electrode surfaces", detectable scale depends on the diffusion coefficient, and it is in the range of 1–100 μm for conventional electrochemistry. By taking this issue into account, a simple approach is proposed to perform fractal analysis at nanoscale, which is an important requirement in surface studies. Increasing the electrolyte viscosity and decreasing the environment temperature lead to slower diffusion. Thus, the detectable fractality scale, which is proportional to the square root of diffusion coefficient, can be reduced. This provides an opportunity for fractal analysis at nanoscale. In this case, the possible errors due to natural convection (i.e., an important obstacle in this method) will also be significantly reduced. This simple approach in company with the previously developed gold-masking approach provides an acceptable generality for fractal analysis of electrode surfaces.