Cleaning anode basket in silver cell

[James Ball]

I have run 2-3 kg of silver shot through my 6.8 L silver cell with 200 g Ag/L. At 3.5 v my amps were initially 2.6 amps. The amps have dropped to below 2 amps but the silver content is still close to 200 g/L using the Volhard titration and the copper concentration is between 10 and 20 g/L using standard reference vials for comparison. My cell should be running fine. I got the idea from Sreetips that the slimes could be clogging the Dacron filter. I removed the silver and slime from the anode basket. There was a lot of slime. I washed the silver and the slime from the basket using distilled water. The Dacron filter was still gray. I soaked the Dacron filter in distlled water with a little nitric acid and some heat (not boiling). The filter cleaned up nice and was very white and still slowly filtered water. As soon as it was white, less than 5 minutes, I took it out and rinsed it with distilled water. I wanted to minimize any damage to the filter. After a lot of rinsing I reinstalled the anode filter and it works great.. My amps are over 3 amps - even better than when I started. Has anyone tried this? It seems to work well.

Dacron (polyester) is safe to use at 10% nitric acid and 205 F. see attachment.