GROWTH OF MERCURY ELECTRODEPOSITS ON AN INLAID DISK - VOLTAMMETRIC THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS

Thermodynamics suggests that, for certain interrelations of the interfacial energies involved, mercury electrodeposits on a small, inlaid, metal disc as a film, then grows through a hemispherical to an almost spherical shape. On the assumption that such growing deposits behave as steady-state microelectrodes, the voltammetric diffusion-limited current is predicted and the corresponding charge-versus-time relationship derived. Experiments using mercury deposited from aqueous solution onto inlaid platinum microdiscs support these predictions for disc radii not exceeding 2.5 μm. © 1990.