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Monday, June 06, 2011

Soliciting book or review article recommendations

I am interested in reading good books or review articles on two particular topics, and I'm hoping that by "crowd-sourcing" to my readership, I might do better than wandering through the literature.  First, I want to find an authoritative discussion of the physics behind the electrochemical potentials of battery materials - not the lore of decades of electrochemistry, but a real hashing out of the physics.  Second, I would like to find a thorough, authoritative discussion of the physics behind catalysis.  Again, I'm not interested in handwaves and parametrized empirical knowledge, but would prefer a physics-based discussion that explains, e.g., why Pd is good at splitting H2, while Ti is not.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude, I think that science would like those things.

Douglas Natelson said...

@anon - heh. Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of.

Unknown said...

"Challenges for Rechargeable Li Batteries" by Goodenough (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cm901452z) - certainly authoritative, but probably only partly addressing the first topic.

Physics Today said...

It's not a book, but Gerhard Ertl and Hans-Joachim Freund's Physics Today article Catalysis and Surface Science might be good place to start.

Zach said...

Catalysts are kind of a black art, as I understand it. That being said, isn't there a chemistry department in the next building over who could help you with that?

Douglas Natelson said...

Thanks for the article suggestions - the Goodenough battery paper in particular is along the lines of what I was seeking. Zach, yes, but summer is a tough time to track people down sometimes.

David A. Muller said...

The reference recommended to me, and is on my summer reading list (but only partly read) is "Interfacial Electrochemistry" by Wolfgang Schmickler. There is a 2nd ed from 2010. It does a nice job of mapping electrochemical jargon to terms familiar to solid state physics, after which all those short battery reviews make more sense.

Douglas Natelson said...

David - Thanks! I got the '96 edition out of our library this afternoon, and it does look good. It's refreshing to read something on this topic written by a physicist.

soggybomb said...

I have been looking for a similar sort of book for some research I have begun recently...

cash for old cell phones said...

I think they might do better than wandering through the literature.