Electrochemistry by the Numbers: Faraday's Laws, Plating Mass & Thickness, Current Efficiency, Cell Potentials, the Nernst Equation & Battery Capacity

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn the current and time of five fictional plating runs into coulombs, ampere-hours and moles of electrons, and convert a battery rating from mAh to coulombs.
• Calculate how many moles and grams of metal five fictional plating jobs deposit, using a teaching table of molar masses and ion charges, and find the copper equivalent per ampere-hour.
• Turn deposited masses into layer thicknesses in micrometres, work out how fast nickel builds up at a given current density, and find the silver mass for a target layer.
• Compare weighed deposits of five fictional nickel runs with Faraday's law, compute their current efficiency run by run and pooled, and plan the time for a 15 µm layer at the planning efficiency.
• Fill a job sheet for three fictional rack jobs: how many racks each order needs, the current per rack, the plating time per rack and the metal deposited on the whole order.
• Read standard reduction potentials from a teaching table, compute the voltage of six cells, decide which ones run on their own and convert the voltage into the free energy ΔG = −nFE.
• Compute the voltage of a zinc–copper cell for six concentration pairs, the voltage of a silver concentration cell, the copper concentration for a target voltage and the Nernst factor at another temperature.
• Compute the theoretical capacity in mAh per gram of five electrode materials, the usable capacity of a fictional zinc cell and the material needed for a required capacity, and chart the materials side by side.