Page 13 - MODERN ELECTROCHEMISTRY

xii PREFACE

the beginning of a great step toward a healthier environment. The use of the new
room-temperature molten salts has made it possible to exploit the advantage of
working with pure liquid electrolytes—no solvent—without the rigors of working at
1000 °C.
All the great challenges of electrochemistry at 2000 A.D. do not have to be
addressed in this second edition for this is an undergraduate text, stressing the teaching
of fundamentals with an occasional preview of the advancing frontier.
The basic attributes of the book are unchanged: lucidity comes first. Since the text
is not a graduate text, there is no confusing balancing of the merits of one model against
those of another; the most probable model at the time of writing is described.
Throughout it is recognized that theoretical concepts rise and fall; a theory that lasts
a generation is doing well.
These philosophies have been the source of some of the choices made when
balancing what should be retained and what rewritten. The result is quite heterogene-
ous. Chapters 1 and 2 are completely new. The contributions from neutron diffraction
measurements in solutions and those from other spectroscopic methods have torn away
many of the veils covering knowledge of the first 1–2 layers of solvent around an ion.
Chapter 3 also contains much new material. Debye and Huckel’s famous calculation
is two generations old and it is surely time to move toward new ideas. Chapter 4, on
the other hand, presents much material on transport that is phenomenological—mate-
rial so basic that it must be presented but shows little variation with time.
The last chapter, which is on ionic liquids, describes the continuing evolution that
is the result of the development of low-temperature molten salts and the contributions
of computer modeling. The description of models of molten silicates contains much
of the original material in the first edition, for the models described there are those still
used today.
A new feature is the liberal supply of problems for student solution—about 50
per chapter. This idea has been purloined from the excellent physical chemistry
textbook by Peter Atkins (W. H. Freeman). There are exercises, practice in the use of
the chapter’s equations; problems (the chapter’s material related to actual situations);
and finally, a few much more difficult tasks which are called “microresearch prob-
lems,” each one of which may take some hours to solve.
The authors have not hesitated to call on colleagues for help in understanding new
material and in deciding what is vital and what can be left for the literature. The authors
would particularly like to thank John Enderby (University of Bristol) for his review
of Chapter 2; Tony Haymet (University of Sydney) for advice on the weight to be
given to various developments that followed Debye and Hückel’s ground-breaking
work and for tutoring us on computational advances in respect to electrolytic ion pairs.
Michael Lyons (University of Dublin) is to be thanked for allowing the present authors
use of an advanced chapter on transport phenomena in electrolytes written by him.
Austin Angell (Arizona State University of Tempe) in particular and Douglas Inman