Oxidize silver chloride using urea

[Ayham Hafez]

I remember that I have seen a video on silver recovery, they used urea to oxidize silver chloride to metallic silver rather than using lye and sugar method, anyone tested this method before? Is it same like lye and sugar method?

 

[Yggdrasil]

I remember that I have seen a video on silver recovery, they used urea to oxidize silver chloride to metallic silver rather than using lye and sugar method, anyone tested this method before? Is it same like lye and sugar method?

I have never heared about it.
You need to stop watching these YouTube videos, with a few exeptions they will easily lead you astray.
Start reading books and this forum instead.

 

[Martijn]

I have seen a video where bucketloads of huge gold nuggets are laying on top of sand and gravel in a riverbed and they were all over the place!!

 

[Ultrax]

Unfortunately, you cannot recover Ag with urea from its chloride, but you always can dissolve metallic silver in molten urea-chloride solution and try to reverse the process for educational purposes

 

[4metals]

I remember that I have seen a video on silver recovery, they used urea to oxidize silver chloride to metallic silver rather than using lye and sugar method, anyone tested this method before? Is it same like lye and sugar method?

Ayham,

It seems your posts are about a plethora of different techniques for a variety of precious metal containing materials. Why don’t you just tell us what you are hoping to do and what you are working with so we can make sense of it all and give you some sound information to get you started in the right direction?

 

[adam mizer]

I have seen a video where bucketloads of huge gold nuggets are laying on top of sand and gravel in a riverbed and they were all over the place!!

Yes I remember this video. Believe it was someplace maybe in Russia. However I cannot believe the amount the gold and the sort of careless nature of the guy that made the video.
No help to Ayham and his urea.

 

[Ayham Hafez]

This is the video

 

[Shark]

He is dropping the silver as a chloride by using salt.

 

[4metals]

He added what looks like urea prills to the Silver Chloride in water. The hot water is intended to dissolve out any lead chloride. Then he added Hydrochloric Acid and rinsed what looked like very granular chunks. Possibly Silver oxide. Not convinced there weren't some steps at that point that were not on the video.

It did not smoke on melting so it definitely wasn't Silver Chloride. My guess is he made Silver oxide which, before melting breaks down to Silver metal and O₂

You can get the same result by adding liquid caustic to the Silver Chloride and melting the resultant Silver oxide. Easy to tell when the conversion is complete as the Silver oxide is black.

 

[Darkthirty]

I remember that I have seen a video on silver recovery, they used urea to oxidize silver chloride to metallic silver rather than using lye and sugar method, anyone tested this method before? Is it same like lye and sugar method?

The urea was to eliminate the HNO3

 

[4metals]

The urea was to eliminate the HNO3

At that point after all of the rinses the nitric was gone.

 

[adam mizer]

Interesting but I wonder if there were losses. Will or did all the chloride become oxidized?

 

[Ultrax]

Practically, you will never receive a 100% finalized reaction in the solutions that involve Ag, Au, or PM. Maybe in very clean and accurate academic cases. Traces of source components are always observable.
The rate of a chemical reaction is highly nonlinear, and a person’s expectations of the result are linear in time, so usually there is not enough patience to wait for a 100% reaction. The first 95% of the reaction will take place, for example, in 24 hours, and the remaining 5% will take another two weeks. This is approximately the proportion of non-linearity.

 

[orvi]

Interesting but I wonder if there were losses. Will or did all the chloride become oxidized?

I think that I need to correct one thing here - silver is already oxidized in silver chloride. Further oxidize the silver would mean create Ag(II) from Ag(I), which is theoretically (and also practically) possible in some special conditions, but it is of no value for us refiners. We want to REDUCE silver chloride to form silver metal. Meaning we want to give Ag(I) one electron to become Ag(0) - which is metallic elemental silver which we want.

I know that we were most probably meaning the same thing, but terminology here is important in my opinion (as professional chemist).

 

[Ultrax]

I believe that the author of the topic meant exactly the reduction (not oxidation, or rather chlorination) of silver

 

[Saddiq NG]

I've tried this Urea method before and I only ended up wasting my silver chloride because nothing happened, although I saw chemical equations online and from chat gpt that shows that urea will reduce the silver chloride to metallic silver

 

[Ayham Hafez]

I believe that the author of the topic meant exactly the reduction (not oxidation, or rather chlorination) of silver

Yes indeed