Electrochemist

This is an old as the hills application that I decided to try to test and review despite the fact that I have no experience or knowledge regarding the field of electrochemistry.

Even if I’m a complete newbie when it comes to electrochemistry, I can still tell that this application could use some serious updates and improvements. I mean, in the year 2015 when Windows 10 is already out, this application looks like it’s meant to run on Windows 95 at best. Furthermore, when installing this program you have to take care of DLLs, runtimes, and OCX Active X components, so be prepared to have the free time to download and install separately such files, or even obsolete prerequisites like MS Visual Basic 6, in case something goes wrong. And something going wrong is actually not such an unlikely thing, considering how old and outdated this tool seems to be.

Anyway, this tool, now called “Electrochemist” and formerly known as Polar and Polarograph, seems to be quite powerful and feature rich, as it’s capable of simulating electrochemical experiments while providing access to a lot of additional data and to numerous secondary functions. For example, it can analytically and digitally simulate voltammograms and polarograms on virtually any mechanism at over 10 electrode geometries (planar, spherical, semi-spherical, cylindrical, semi-cylindrical, microdisc, thin film, and rotating electrodes) in over 10 techniques (linear sweep and CV, DC, normal pulse, differential pulse, square wave, additive square wave, and staircase voltammetries). If this didn’t seem comprehensive enough for you already, let me add that this tool can also simulate the effects to change over 30 parameters and it includes over 1000 theoretical equations. Extensive data analysis possibilities are available as well, including peak data detection.

Considering how comprehensive it is, there’s no wonder “Electrochemist” is also quite difficult to use. Even if you’re an expert in electrochemistry, you’ll still probably have to check the manual of this tool in order to be able to use it properly.

Cutting long story short, “Electrochemist” can prove to be of undeniable help to those in need of performing electrochemical simulations and data analysis, and that’s despite the fact that it also comes with hard-to-ignore flaws.