(Henry Linford Award) Overcoming Challenges in Teaching Electrochemical Engineering
Authors: Landau Uziel 
Published: August 2024

Electrochemical engineering is a highly interdisciplinary topic, requiring some preliminary knowledge of chemistry, material science, transport, kinetics, and process design. The major challenge in teaching the topic is that unlike most classes, where all students are ‘in-step’ in terms of their preparation, electrochemical engineering courses typically draw students from different disciplines (e.g., chemical engineering, chemistry, material science, biomedical engineering) with different background and preparation. This problem is further exacerbated in teaching electrochemical engineering short courses, which are typically attended by practicing engineers having quite different backgrounds, experience levels, and interests.

When first encountering these issues, I thought that the best approach is to start from the basics, and obtain, through detailed mathematical derivations, very convincingly, the relevant equations. I could not be more wrong: students quickly lost interest, and the practical significance was often missed. I found out, that it is much more effective to first describe the issues and relevancy of the topic, and then, while still emphasizing the fundamentals, only outline the detailed derivations and skip to the final results, explaining the assumptions and limitations, while focusing on the applications and use. The students were still given class notes detailing the derivations and were directed to appropriate book chapters and publications for further reading.

In terms of course content, I followed my admired and memorable teacher, Charles Tobias, who first introduced me, and so many others, to electrochemical engineering. Starting with ionic conduction and transport, and moving on to electrochemical thermodynamics, overpotentials, current distributions, multi-components and alloy deposition, transient effects, and scaling. Each topic was accompanied by relevant examples and homework problems which were later reviewed in class. I found out that it was not an effective use of class time to provide detailed discussion of specific electrochemical process technologies, which the students could read about in textbooks. Consequently, just one class period was devoted for brief discussion of each of the following: batteries and fuel-cells, electroplating, electrowinning and electrorefining, electrolytic processes, and corrosion. Emphasis was placed on discussing the fundamentals, issues, and major challenges for each. Students had the opportunity for in-depth study of additional specific applications by preparing and presenting in class a term-paper. To minimize direct reproduction from the literature, students had to indicate and discuss relevancy to fundamentals studied in class. Students could select their own topics and thereby relate the class material to their own disciplinary interests.

To foster critical thinking and discussion, and to integrate the material taught, comprehensive case studies were presented and discussed in class. These case studies included among others, topics related to my own research, including scaling analysis, roughness evolution and dendritic growth, bottom-up plating of semi-conductor interconnects, and periodic reverse plating. These will be discussed in the oral presentation in more detail.

I would like to conclude by thanking all my former students, who enriched my life so much, and whom I treasure as my ‘academic family’. Lastly and very importantly, I thank my dear friends and colleagues at Case Western Reserve University who made my teaching and research there most enjoyable, through stimulating discussions and close friendships.