Coupling between turbulence, chemical mass transport of a reacting salt and electrochemical transformations at the wall are considered in this paper. This first approach deals with the whole coupled problem wherein the effect of the electrical potential field is assumed to be negligible. Direct Numerical Simulations are performed in a fully developed turbulent channel flow wherein the Karman number is Re-tau = 180 and the Schmidt number is 1. The direct simulations that are free of closure schemes allow us to conveniently access to the physics of this complex transport phenomenon. Detailed statistics of the concentration and the flow fields are reported here. We show in particular that, as the ratio of the exchange current density to the salt diffusivity is modified, the concentration field evolves between two asymptotic cases governed either by Neumann or Dirichlet boundary conditions. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.