# Silver Chloride to Silver Oxide



## ppp1111ppp (May 6, 2014)

Hello all, 
I've been on your forum many times and have spent a lot of time working on converting silver chloride to silver oxide (unsuccessfully), I'm currently following the Karo syrup method but instead of converting to metal with syrup i go directly to washing the silver oxide. 

My process:
Add 50% NaOH to damp silver chloride cake 2:1 ratio by weight (this is an excess of NaOH), i then add a little bit of water to assist in mixing the slurry, next i use a high shear mixer to break up silver chloride particles. When I'm finished, the slurry is dark black. 

I wash my silver oxide by decanting and filtering; washing enough times to make the pH of the affluent stream neutral. 

Next I add my cake to a beaker of dilute (~32%) nitric acid and attempt to digest. The solids appear to be nonreactive in nitric acid (even with heat) leaving behind a dark fluffy particle. I've tested the solution and confirmed silver nitrate is present however my overall yield is very low,~20%.

Can anyone explain why this is happening; I've worked through the same method using karo syrup to convert oxide to metal and got ~95% yield.


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## Lou (May 6, 2014)

Improper washing.


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## MysticColby (May 9, 2014)

silver oxide reacts with nitric acid to give silver nitrate? I didn't know.


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## kadriver (May 29, 2014)

ppp1111ppp said:


> Hello all,
> 
> I wash my silver oxide by decanting and filtering; washing enough times to make the pH of the affluent stream neutral.



Instead of trying to digest the silver oxide in nitric, pull a little of the washed silver oxide out and dry it completely over low heat.

Then put it in a melt dish and try to melt the silver oxide directly into silver metal.

I have never done this (but I intend to try it on my next batch of silver oxide).

One of the forum moderators suggested this to me and claimed that it works quite nicely.

kadriver


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## Lou (May 29, 2014)

It does work nicely. It will go from black brown to gray powder. Then can be boiled in DI water until low TDS reading and sold as silver powder.


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