Electrolyte for refining silver

[solar_plasma]

As a side note: AgSO₄ is too soluble to drop quantitatively, If absolutely needed SO₄⁺⁺ can be precipitated almost quantitatively by adding only the needed amount of Ba(NO₃)₂. This will leave you with insoluble BaSO₄ and HNO₃.

 

[Wulfgar]

Hello, I think you've got the wrong fellow here. I have never made a video using batteries as a power source for a silver cell. I have produced a video in two parts that shows how to make silver shot for the cell and how to build a 3.5 liter small scale silver cell using a stainless steel bowl. I have always used a DC power supply to run my silver cell(s).

I think I responded to a message from you about electrolyte on my YouTube channel.

When making electrolyte I NEVER use a set amount of nitric acid. I place the pure silver crystal in a suitable beaker WITH A WATCH GLASS OR SAUCER TO COVER THE BEAKER and add DISTILLED water only.The only time the cover is off the beaker is when I am adding reagents or more distilled water. I like to use a little over 150 grams of pure silver crystal per liter of electrolyte.

Then over the course of a 24 hour period or so with medium low heat I slowly add small doses of concentrated nitric acid until Maybe 10% of the silver is left undissolved. Then I turn up the heat and lightly boil the solution adding concentrated nitric acid in decreasing doses until just a few bits of silver are left and absolutely no more fumes are produced.

As pointed out earlier, this ensures that very little free nitric acid is in the electrolyte which is a good thing because excess free nitric acid causes problems. Under no conditions would I ever use electrolyte that contained 50% concentrated nitric acid.

Also, the amount of silver in your electrolyte will affect conductivity between your anode basket (positive power lead) and the cathode (negative power lead). Higher silver concentration in your electrolyte will make it more conductive and increase electrical flow (amperage) which will increase the speed that the cell dissolves the silver in the anode basket and plates out the pure silver at the cathode. Another factor is the anode basket size. A larger basket and filter will present more surface area of impure silver to the cell and dissolve the impure silver faster.

Good luck with your silver cell experiments!

kadriver aka sreetips

Holy crap,
It’s streetips! I love your videos man. I’m about to start doing this myself, along with the gold refining ones. I follow all your videos. Will this method work for gold as well? Meaning, can I use chloroauric acid as an electrolyte?

 

[LaMar Marshall]

If I understand you correctly, you're dissolving one ounce of silver for your electrolyte. You'll need about 30 ml. of nitric diluted with 30 ml. of water. If you dilute that by 10, you'll end up with one ounce of silver in 600 ml. of electrolyte. That's pretty low starting silver content. At that level, copper will contaminate your crystal pretty quickly. You might want to keep studying to see what others are using.

We still don't know how pure your cemented silver is.

To test the purity of your crystal, dissolve a bit in 50/50 nitric acid. If it's pure, the solution should be virtually clear. If there's any blue tint, you've codeposited copper (or not washed your crystal enough).

It took me a year and a half to read through all the information on the forum the first time.

Dave

Dang, so what foram should I start with. Wow!
1 1/2 years

 

[Yggdrasil]

Dang, so what foram should I start with. Wow!
1 1/2 years

Can you please explain.
This post is confusing.

 

[Shark]

Dang, so what foram should I start with. Wow!
1 1/2 years

Start with the forum section that best describes your primary interest. Do not over look the library section as there is a lot of good stuff in condensed form. If you already have access to material, knowing that could help point you to more specific sections. I personally, like Dave and many others, just read the whole thing. Later on it helped very much in having some basic back ground already from all the reading.

Yggdrasil has a standard introductory post of things to get you started that will help as well. Pay close attention to those as they are deceivingly more helpful than they appear at first.

By the way, Welcome to GRF.

 

[4metals]

Go to this Thread and select the link for small silver cell, it contains results of searched for good informative threads about small silver cells.