Application of Cyclic Voltammetry:

Coupled chemical Reactions

There are inorganic ions, metal complexes and some organic compounds that undergo electron transfer reactions without the making or breaking of covalent bonds. A vast majority of electrochemical reactions include an electron transfer step that leads to a species that rapidly reacts along with components of the medium through so called coupled chemical reactions. One of the most meaningful aspects of CV is its applications to the qualitative diagnosis of these homogeneous chemical reactions which are coupled to the electrode surface gives the capability for producing a species during the forward scan and then probing its fate along with the reverse scan and subsequent  cycles, all within a matter of seconds or less.

Further, the time scale of the experiment is adjustable over various sequences of magnitude through changing the potential scan rate, enabling a few assessments of the rates of several reactions. There are various instances of the coupled chemical reactions, therefore two are given below.

A cyclic voltammogram for the popular antibiotic chlor-amphenicol is described in Figure. The scan was started in a negative direction from 0.0 V. Three peaks are observed, peak A for the initial reduction, peak B for oxidation of a product of this reduction and peak C for oxidation of a product resulting from the events accounting for peak B. All three "peaks" or "waves" involve more than a easy electron transfer reaction.