Potentiostats are electrical apparatuses that apply and control the voltage between two points. These devices are essential in electrochemistry and very important for testing batteries and catalysts since they are just sets of electrochemical reactions.

 

The problem is they are very expensive and can be cost prohibitive for people to enter the electrochemical space. For reference, a flagship one-channel potentiostat for industrial applications meaning high current and low voltage specifications can run as high as $10,000. One channel can only run one chemical reaction at a time so you can also imagine if you were testing a fuel cell which has many channels, it would be that number of channels * $10,000. Very expensive stuff for an essential product especially if you're in a research group with limited resources and funding.  

 

Thus, we were tasked and received sponsorship by Reactwell, a local hard science & engineering startup headquartered in New Orleans, to create a do-it-yourself (DIY) potentiostat for industrial applications. Our potentiostat would help with (1) creating affordable potentiostats with the same quality that are much less than $10,000(<$1000) (2) one of ReactWell's project which is to abate greenhouse gas emissions by finding economic and productive use cases that incentivize the capture, conversion and utilization of carbon dioxide gas, resulting in a net zero carbon world.