A largely automatic instrument for the measurement of the admittance of a galvanic cell is described. During a measurement the frequency of the alternating voltage and the dc voltage are scanned stepwise in a programmed sequence. A high precision has been obtained by applying a programmed correction procedure and an automatic correction for short-term drift.The performance of the instrument is demonstrated on a dummy cell, a cell with supporting electrolyte only and on the determination of the kinetic parameters of the fast Cd(II) ion reduction on the DME in 1 M KC1.
(I) INTRODUCTIONIn the past the impedance method has proved to be a powerful method for the study of electrochemical cells. The method may be applied for several purposes, e.g. characterization of an electrochemical object to find possible mechanisms in electrochemical processes, or in electroanalytical chemistry. In the last two cases the electrochemical object is mostly the dropping mercury (DME), because of its advantages of reproducibility and relative chemical inertness.When accurate measurements were required, ac bridges [ 1--4] were long considered to be superior to direct-measuring, phase-sensitive devices [ 5--11 ]. However, the (manual) operation of an ac bridge is tedious and time-consuming, especially in the case of a non-stationary object. In particular, in studies of electrode processes, it is increasingly recognized that many data points are needed, in both a wide frequency and a wide dc potential range, in order to be able todistinguish the possible contributions of charge transfer, diffusional mass transport, coupled chemical reactions and adsorption phenomena. It is therefore understandable that in recent developments much effort has been devoted to design more or less automatically operated, directmeasuring devices. For example, Huebert [ 12], using several tuned amplifiers, was able to apply a number of frequencies simultaneously to the cell, but still