http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9556-8341
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ABSTRACT
The electrodeposition of metals in ionic liquids and deep eutectic solvents leads to deposits with significantly different morphologies to those seen with aqueous solutions. The classical methods of fitting amperometric data to nucleation and growth mechanisms do not fit the data well in ionic systems and tend to focus on the short time-scale aspects of nucleation. In the current study, ex-situ AFM was used to model crystallite sizes and distributions by digitising and modelling the images. The deposition of silver from a deep eutectic solvent was chosen as it has been studied by several groups with a variety of techniques. The crystallite size data obtained from AFM and chronoamperometry for long time-scale deposition studies are compared and it is shown that the trends are similar, but there is a discrepancy in the nuclear number density of approximately an order of magnitude. The nuclear number density was found to be consistent with aqueous nucleation studies once differences in concentration and mass transport were accounted for.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the Pakistani Government for funding (MA and SS). Some of the images for this paper were taken from the PhD thesis of M. Azam.Citation31
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
A. P. Abbott https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9556-8341
K. S. Ryder http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2803-6884