Issue 7, 2022

Electrochemistry under confinement

Abstract

Although the term ‘confinement’ regularly appears in electrochemical literature, elevated by continuous progression in the research of nanomaterials and nanostructures, up until today the various aspects of confinement considered in electrochemistry are rather scattered individual contributions outside the established disciplines in this field. Thanks to a number of highly original publications and the growing appreciation of confinement as an overarching link between different exciting new research strategies, ‘electrochemistry under confinement’ is the process of forming a research discipline of its own. To aid the development a coherent terminology and joint basic concepts, as crucial factors for this transformation, this review provides an overview on the different effects on electrochemical processes known to date that can be caused by confinement. It also suggests where boundaries to other effects, such as nano-effects could be drawn. To conceptualize the vast amount of research activities revolving around the main concepts of confinement, we define six types of confinement and select two of them to discuss the state of the art and anticipated future developments in more detail. The first type concerns nanochannel environments and their applications for electrodeposition and for electrochemical sensing. The second type covers the rather newly emerging field of colloidal single entity confinement in electrochemistry. In these contexts, we will for instance address the influence of confinement on the mass transport and electric field distributions and will link the associated changes in local species concentration or in the local driving force to altered reaction kinetics and product selectivity. Highlighting pioneering works and exciting recent developments, this educational review does not only aim at surveying and categorizing the state-of-the-art, but seeks to specifically point out future perspectives in the field of confinement-controlled electrochemistry.

Graphical abstract: Electrochemistry under confinement

Article information

Article type
Review Article
Submitted
25 aug 2021
First published
11 mrt 2022
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Soc. Rev., 2022,51, 2491-2543

Electrochemistry under confinement

M. Jaugstetter, N. Blanc, M. Kratz and K. Tschulik, Chem. Soc. Rev., 2022, 51, 2491 DOI: 10.1039/D1CS00789K

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements