{"id":128,"date":"2014-05-16T15:23:40","date_gmt":"2014-05-16T15:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/?p=128"},"modified":"2014-06-12T08:08:44","modified_gmt":"2014-06-12T12:08:44","slug":"new-book-about-enzyme-electrodes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"New Book About Enzyme Electrodes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I wrote Chapter 9 in\u00a0Enzymatic Fuel Cells: From Fundamentals to Applications<\/a><\/strong>, which is coming out May 19th. It’s edited by Plamen Atanassov,\u00a0Heather Luckarift, and Glenn Johnson. The book grew out of a multi-university research project I was part of as a graduate student, with the goal of using biological catalysts for small power sources.<\/p>\n

This is controversial research<\/strong>: it is, trust me. But if it works it has a high payoff. Summarizing just one possible application: we as humanity use an expensive element, platinum, for almost all of our room-temperature catalysis. This is why you don’t own very many things that involve room-temperature catalysis. However, living things do catalysis at physiological temperature (98.6 degrees F, not much higher) all the time. If we could use their tricks, catalysis would get much less expensive.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some enzyme electrodes actually have incredibly high volumetric energy densities<\/strong>. The ones I was making as a graduate student reduced oxygen at 40 A\/cm3<\/sup> at 0.7 V, which is higher than some old-school platinum electrodes, and<\/em> they do all the catalysis with copper. The downside is they don’t last a long time. But since platinum is 21,000 times more expensive than copper, it could be worth it.<\/p>\n

My chapter<\/a> gave a me a chance to summarize my graduate research in a unified way, making the point I wanted to make. Essentially I showed you could double the catalytic current<\/strong> of one of these electrodes by being smarter about the transport phenomena involved. I published the results in two<\/a> papers<\/a> with dry, academic titles, because let’s face it I sometimes like the dry and academic. Only now, after a few more years of experience, I feel it would have been better to publish them together and title it The Point Is The Current Is Twice As High<\/em>. Here’s the important graph below (from here<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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See how the curves are S-shaped, and the bottom part is at about -7 mA\/cm2<\/sup> in one case and about -14 mA\/cm2<\/sup> in another? That’s the doubling. There’s actually a more important figure earlier in the paper, but this one is the easiest to explain. Science: it’s also about communication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote Chapter 9 in\u00a0Enzymatic Fuel Cells: From Fundamentals to Applications, which is coming out May 19th. It’s edited by Plamen Atanassov,\u00a0Heather Luckarift, and Glenn Johnson. The book grew out of a multi-university research project I was part of as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.joshuagallaway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}