Imagine that you have discovered a plant a that produces electricity. In order to harness this plant to do work, you need to know more about it. You decide to conduct some simple experiments.
1) A scan of the plant's physiology shows you that electricity is produced in a redox reaction involving oxalic acid/carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide/oxygen gas under acidic conditions. What is a possible balanced redox equation involving these compounds? Which compound is the oxidizing agent and which compound is the reducing agent?
2) Using a table of standard reduction potentials, what is the Eocell value for the redox process you proposed in #1 above?
3) What is the standard free energy of the cell? Is this process spontaneous or non-spontaneous? It makes sense that in order to produce electricity, the plant's redox process should be spontaneous. If your calculations show the process to be non-spontaneous, how would you modify your reaction to make it spontaneous?
4) You decide to try to build a battery using the same chemical process as the plant. Make a diagram and fully describe the electrochemical cell that you would need to build. Note that you may need to use a platinum electrode to make contact with some of the solutions.
5) Calculate the cell potential of your battery after one of the solutions has used up half of it's ion concentration.