Importance of Reducing and Oxidizing Agents
Reducing agents and oxidizing agents are the ones responsible for corrosion, which is the “degradation of metals as a result of electrochemical activity”. Corrosion requires an anode and cathode to take place. The anode is an element that loses electrons (reducing agent), thus oxidation always occurs in the anode, and the cathode is an element that gains electrons (oxidizing agent), thus reduction always occurs in the cathode. Corrosion occurs whenever there’s a difference in oxidation potential. When this is present, the anode metal begins deteriorating, given there is an electrical connection and the presence of an electrolyte.
Read more about this topic: Reducing Agent
Famous quotes containing the words importance of, importance, reducing and/or agents:
“The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning. Life is flat, barren, zestless, if one can find one’s lost vision nowhere.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
“When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Modern man’s capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity’s capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)