A theoretical study on resistance of electrolytic solution: Measurement of electrolytic conductivity

Abstract We propose a theoretical approach to determine the conductivity of electrolytic solution using sine waveform voltage as a triggering signal. The approach is based on the acquisition of the complex impedance in two-electrode conductance cell by analyzing the equivalent circuit. We deduce the formula of resistance in electrolytic solution by doing a series of calculations in transformation, simplification, and replacement for the complex impedance and solving the quadratic equation with unknown solution resistance. Even though there exists electrode polarization or the distributed capacitance which may affect the measurement, we can still obtain the electrolytic conductivity. In this paper, we focus on deducing the expression for the value of resistance in electrolytic solution. To our knowledge, this is the first report on directly deducing the resistance’s value. In particular, the extent of the electrode polarization is also analyzed and mathematically formulated. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper can achieve high precision.