Electrochemistry Copper Nitrate Cell

[rusty]

Great idea!. I'm interested in the type of membranes that you plan to use. 8)

I managed to get some asbestos sheet from the farm, but it is much thicker that I had remembered it, some other thoughts are to use unglazed tile, sold as quarry tile. Then there are large sheets of fire brick that comes in tile used in fireplaces.

Also there is a square liner used inside old brick chimneys, a person could cut one side off to use, this is unglazed but again on the thick side, some old houses has asbestos tiles affixed to the outside walls. I was fortunate to find some of these at the dump a week ago. These tiles are usually painted one side an they are on the thin side.

I'm aware of the health hazards of cutting asbestos and so should you, cutting should be done wet to keep dust and fiber to a minimum and wear appropriate breathing gear. It looks like the discarded house tiles are going to be a first choice to use as a membrane.

I read another article on another copper nitrate electrolyte cell and they do not use any membrane in the cell. A point of interest is that the cathode is made narrower than the anode to allow for the growth of copper.

Regards
Rusty

 

[Harold_V]

It looks like the discarded house tiles are going to be a first choice to use as a membrane.

I have not followed this thread intimately, so my comment may not be valid. That being said, you may have to review your decision on using house tiles. If memory serves, they are made of Transite, which is bonded with Portland cement, and readily breaks down in the presence of acid.

Harold

 

[seawolf]

What about using a polypropylene anode bag to catch the slimes or a polypropylene divider as a membrane?
Mark

 

[rusty]

It looks like the discarded house tiles are going to be a first choice to use as a membrane.

I have not followed this thread intimately, so my comment may not be valid. That being said, you may have to review your decision on using house tiles. If memory serves, they are made of Transite, which is bonded with Portland cement, and readily breaks down in the presence of acid.

Harold

Thanks Harold for the information on Transite, it appears that all the asbestos board I have is of the same material made of asbestos fiber bonded with Portland Cement. And this would include the chimney tiles, so I can scrap that idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transite

seawolf, yes an anode bag wold work. I'm trying to replicate an old cell design, which was made from wood and asbestos board just for kicks.

Regards
Rusty

 

[qst42know]

I haven't shopped around (price wise) but asbestos is still available as well as close substitutes.

http://www.caztex.net/products.php/12-Dust_free_Asbestos_Cloth.html

 

[aflacglobal]

Do you know what the pore size of the membrane is you’re looking for?

 

[rusty]

Do you know what the pore size of the membrane is you’re looking for?

Unfortunately not, these old books only generalize on procedure. That is one problem with book learning you still have to get your hands dirty to fine tune the construction of the cell and play with the electrolyte, temperature and voltage to get it right.

I should have my furnace over here at this new shop sometime this upcoming week, then I plan to make anodes to experiment with. Using a large telegraph glass battery case as my cell will get this project started..

The disadvantage of using an undivided cell is that silver and palladium will pollute all the electrolyte making harvesting a bit more work, in the divided cell you only have to remove the electrolyte from the anode side of the cell which you then cement the values out with scrap copper returning the barren solution back into the cell to further reclaim the copper. You must add a bit of free nitric from time to time to the electrolyte.

Should be a fun experiment.

Regards
Rusty

 

[rusty]

The furnace and crucibles are at the new shop, the first melt shall consist of the copper from microwave magnetron's. I'm hoping to find some gold alloyed with the silver solder from the older ovens.

The washer and copper bolts came from a large Delco tractor starter, I was surprised to see that the washer is silver plated and the bolts have a silver wafer soldered on the tops.

Advantage if using the cell, silver from electroplate can be easily recovered, plus no more wasted silver left behind from sweating the contacts off.

Regards
Rusty

 

[peter i]

there is an old thread about copper refining at Boliden:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/n08u41072184506w/fulltext.pdf

A nice description of an industrial set-up mainly working from copper ore, to pure copper and anode slime, to pure silver and another slime, to pure gold.
(45 kilo anodes... now we're talking silver-cell!)

 

[Juan Manuel Arcos Frank]

Rusty:

Try to use a salt bridge,with it solutions will not mix and you can get silver(and gold and PGM) in one half cell and copper in the other half cell.I am posting for you an old book about copper:

http://www.archive.org/details/metallurgyofcopp030250mbp

I hope it helps.

Keep us posted about your progress.

Kindest regards.

Manuel

 

[rusty]

Rusty:

Try to use a salt bridge,with it solutions will not mix and you can get silver(and gold and PGM) in one half cell and copper in the other half cell.I am posting for you an old book about copper:

http://www.archive.org/details/metallurgyofcopp030250mbp

I hope it helps.

Keep us posted about your progress.

Kindest regards.

Manuel

Thank you very much Manual for the link to the copper metallurgy book, it is much newer than the ones I have on hand. I will be sure to look up information on the salt bridge.

Below is another sample of the material I want to recover the silver from.

Best Regards
Rusty

 

[rusty]

there is an old thread about copper refining at Boliden:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/n08u41072184506w/fulltext.pdf

A nice description of an industrial set-up mainly working from copper ore, to pure copper and anode slime, to pure silver and another slime, to pure gold.
(45 kilo anodes... now we're talking silver-cell!)

Thanks Peter, I have downloaded the article, and have now begun the task of reading.

The composition of their cell slimes differ from mine but I have found some very interesting information on the first few pages explaining some of the bad things that happened with my copper sulphate electrolyte cell.

The link offers a purchased article, not sure of it's legal to redistribute so to be on the safe side will not repost it.

 

[martyn111]

Out of interest Rusty, do you think that an unglazed flower pot would work in the cell you are building? The walls of the flower pot should be thinner than unglazed quarry tiles and apart from blocking the drainage hole in the bottom of the pot, the construction would be much easier than attempting to construct a box using tiles.

 

[Geo]

you can get the clay pots without the hole. we have a place called The Pottery Barn here and they have about anything you can think of in clay.

 

[rusty]

you can get the clay pots without the hole. we have a place called The Pottery Barn here and they have about anything you can think of in clay.

The clay pot would be perfect, but I'm in Canada with few gardening options living in the country everyone plants in the ground our city dwellers use plastic plants in plastic pots to set in the windows or front porch.

 

[martyn111]

Thanks for your replies Rusty and Geo, I'm not so much thinking of using the cell for refining copper but I am thinking of maybe using a similar set up for a silver refining cell, do you think this would be viable, will the silver pass through the clay (membrane)?

 

[Geo]

it may be a good idea to put it in a plastic bag too. NoIdea had a thread about this. he pyrolized the whole board and melted the metal into anodes parting the copper first with the slimes being, well, everything else.

 

[rusty]

Thanks for your replies Rusty and Geo, I'm not so much thinking of using the cell for refining copper but I am thinking of maybe using a similar set up for a silver refining cell, do you think this would be viable, will the silver pass through the clay (membrane)?

It should work, but for some reason an anode bag is preferred for silver anodes. I think it is because you can incinerate the bag to recover all the values.

 

[martyn111]

Thanks for your input Geo, I will do a search for that thread and study it.
What you have just said has lit a light bulb, the method Patnor used to refine black chips, all the metalics from within the chips could be melted into anodes and refined in this manner, removing the copper first and then treating the slimes.

 

[rusty]

Scrap copper is used as a collector of precious metals the end result is refined copper with precious metals in the cell slimes where they can be further refined.

When I made my copper anodes I added copper with silver soldered connections plus the metallics from some IC's that I had incinerated then milled then processed the anodes in a copper sulphate cell.

What I have now is silver slimes co mixed with other precious metals, almost ready to run in a silver cell, which will then leave me with the gold and platinum group as slimes for further processing.

In the next round I plan on using the copper nitrate as my electrolyte keeping some free nitric available, slightly different procedure with the same end results.