ELECTRO OXIDATION OF ETHANOL ON COPPER AND NICKEL ELECTRODES BY CYCLIC VOLTAMMETRY

Fuel cells are being considered as an important technology that can be used for various power applications. All electrochemical experiments were performed in a conventional three-electrode cell powered by an electrochemical system comprised of an Autolab PGSTAT30 otentiostat/galvanostat and FRA2 boards (Eco Chemie, Utrecht, The Netherlands). The system was run by a PC through FRA and GPES 4.9 software. KOH was used as the supporting electrolyte. The aim of this work is to study the electro oxidation of ethanol on copper and nickel electrodes by cyclic voltammetry (CV). The effect of ethanol concentration may cause the increase of current density and shift ethanol oxidation potential peak (A4 peaks in Figure 1) up to more positive potential. Figure 2 shows the effect of ethanol concentration to current density. Figure 2 shows the peak current density increased with increasing of ethanol concentration. As a conclusion, it can be said that Cu electrode was a better electrode compared with Ni electrode for electro oxidation of ethanol using CV method, however it was observed that Cu electrode was easily oxidized by the formation of metal oxide on the electrode surface compared with Ni electrode.