19.7 Electrolytic Cells | General Chemistry

Chad provides a brief lesson on electrolytic cells highlighting the differences between molten and aqueous electrolysis. Molten electrolysis generally occurs at high temperatures, high enough to melt the salt of interest. But aqueous electrolysis can occur at room temperature as the salt is simply dissolved in water rather than melted. For molten electrolysis predicting the products is straightforward as the cation will be reduced at the cathode, and the anion will be oxidized at the anode both resulting in the production of an element in its elemental form. However, it is a little more challenging to predict the products with aqueous electrolysis as water can also get oxidized and reduced. This complicates the prediction as you generally are only going to have one reduction half reaction occurring at the cathode; either the cation is reduced or water is reduced, whichever is easier (whichever has a higher reduction potential). Generally only one oxidation half reaction will occur at the anode; either the anion is oxidized or water is oxidized, whichever is easier (whichever has a higher oxidation potential).

00:00 Lesson Introduction
00:23 Molten Electrolysis vs Aqueous Electrolysis
01:33 How to Predict the Products of Molten Electrolysis
04:14 How to Predict the Products of Aqueous Electrolysis

[horsegirl]

One of my favorite things about these videos is that they are very short for the amount of material covered and yet nothing is ever rushed in the videos either. I am SO GLAD these are made into a video series and not an hour and a half long video I have to search through to find the info I'm looking for. Extremely user friendly!

[jahidhossain]

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[genevieveaiwonegbe]

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Thanks for making these videos! These have been extremely helpful for my final exam.

[skylardean]

I've liked so many Chad's Prep videos that my thumbs are getting sore.

[toolsstop]

How would you write the overall equation for the aqueous electrolysis example?

[coolkid]

How did you figure out that Na+1 got reduced and Br-1 oxidized? Shouldn't the br get reduced because it has a more positive reduction potential? Thank you, love ur vids

[manav-tyoj]

Shouldn't the 4OH-> O2 + 2H20 + 4e- reaction (Reduction potential of 0.4, so when OH acts as the reducing agent the oxidizing potential is -0.4) occur at the anode because water dissociates into H+ and OH- and since the anode is positively charged, the OH- would be attracted to it. This is the way our teacher taught it, so I don't know who's right now lol

[petevenuti]

'ionic liquids' & low temp euclectic mixtures.