Processing SilverPlate With H2O Cell

[MysticColby]

it might/could work best to have the cathode be a stainless steel bowl, then you suspend the anode (silver-plated item) in the middle, turning it on it's side occasionally and such. I have a pretty good container I'll probably do when I get enough silver to do this. It's about 30 cm tall, 20 cm wide, and made out of some sort of stainless steel (it's an air-tight container for storing sugar or flour on your counter top - I'll research which alloy of stainless it is first). You would not get concave areas (like inside a cup), but you wouldn't have to rotate the piece half way through.

ah, so you're running 24v but reading 0 amps. that sounds more expected. water has such a high resistance that you won't get much current flow at this range of voltages. It also means there isn't a high amount of ions in the water.

the borax will have /some/ silver trapped in it. usually as small spheres. Two ways I know of to get them out:
-add the borax to the next batch. They will still be stuck in there, but not many new ones will be.
-dissolve the borax in dilute nitric acid. takes a long long time and is not worth the acid expense
I usually use the borax until it fills with oxides (gets gunky), then save it in a ziplock. When you get a lot of it, add some fresh borax and some fluorspar then heat all of it in a crucible to very high heat (maybe 1200ºC), stir with graphite rod, then pour it all into a cone mold. the fluorspar makes the borax more liquidy and there will be a button of silver at the bottom of the mold. I keep the button and toss the borax, accepting the small amount of silver lost (should be less than a gram)
getting back to the black: it's metal oxides trapped in the borax that turn it black.

Before adding NaOH to the liquid before harvesting, I recommend this test:
decant the liquid on top of the recovered silver through a filter, save the liquid.
to the liquid, add about a gram of NaOH, stir.
let it settle and observer for any precipitate (silver oxide should be a very visible black). If there is a significant amount, adding NaOH would be a worth-while thing to do. otherwise, it's not needed.
silver oxide can be melted just like other silver powders. it releases the oxygen as it heats up, giving you metallic silver

I'm guessing a major reason for your high loss is because of water. Also, if the is silver oxide being formed, the oxide part will add some weight. And blowing it away with a torch doesn't help either

 

[chemguy]

@modtheworld44
I'm using a desktop SMPS as the power supply, and using 12VDC from it.
I'm getting the cloudy stuff where the ground terminal is connected and that region is being deplated I can see the shiny copper.
the positive terminal is as it is. Am I doing anything wrong?

 

[TheGarbageManCan]

@modtheworld44
I'm using a desktop SMPS as the power supply, and using 12VDC from it.
I'm getting the cloudy stuff where the ground terminal is connected and that region is being deplated I can see the shiny copper.
the positive terminal is as it is. Am I doing anything wrong?

Hello chemguy.

Are you shure it is the +- is setup like you think? Course that sounds strange.
On my negative lead, theres some small bubling and its getting tarnished- maybe it just tarnish you see and think it's copper? I thougs so at one point to, then when i brushet the negative/catode with a brush i could see that wos only some kind of tarnish, and that it wos still silverplated underneth.

How dos your posetive/anode look like? Like as when your startet? How long have it run for?

 

[birdflu78]

Hello all,

I have been interested in a safe and economical way to deplate silver so hopefully together we can get this process to work. I've been following this thread and decided to do a test run. Here are my lab notes, for what it's worth:

I started with a container filled with 750mL tap water. For a power supply, all I have available is a PC power supply so I wired it up for 12V, 13 amps (the yellow wire/black wire combo). Two equal sized spoons were submerged 1/2 way into the water and across from each other in the container, about two inches apart.

Once power was supplied there was an immediate reaction. After running it for a while, along with the results other people are getting I also had a little bit of green moss accumulate on the anode. It appears the copper in the spoon is corroding as well.

I tried running two new spoons in distilled water and there was no reaction in the cell after 5 minutes. I dumped the water out and went back to using tap water.

I ran two spoons on the anode side then filtered the liquid. The spoons aren't completely deplated so there is still a little silver left on them. I got 1.1g of air-dried powder from the two spoons. It was dark gray in color with a couple of small green flakes. I didn't heat the powder to dry it.

Next - melting. I have to note that this was my first time melting anything so my results are probably not the best that could be attained. I melted in an unused dish with a propane torch. After I (finally!) got it melted I ended up with a BB that weighed 0.6g. The bottom of the BB had a small amount of copper on it. I tested the BB with Schwerter's solution and got a blood red color consistent with 925 silver. The solution also removed the copper on the surface.

During melting I did notice a lot of green flame coming out of the dish like I've seen from burning copper. Also, the borax in the dish is now black and I can't get it out of the dish. I had problems keeping the borax and dish hot with the propane torch. I need to get a Mapp torch.

Hopefully this info will help. I wonder how much of the base metal is coming off into the solution and if this is happening for anyone else. Maybe I need to use less volts and/or amps.

EDIT: I can confirm it's taking off base metal as well, at least with my setup. I scaled up to a one gallon container and using two new spoons I left it running overnight. When I looked at it today I had a large pile of green sediment at the bottom of the container. The anode spoon is stripped down to bare copper.

Birdflu78

 

[MysticColby]

If you're using a melting dish in open air, I'd recommend an oxy/fuel torch. propane and mapp will work, but as you found they are slow. oxy/acetylene, oxy/propane, etc. I think I've even heard of oxy/gasoline...

 

[birdflu78]

Thanks for the tip MysticColby. It was definitely a learning experience to melt for the first time. It took so long that I didn't know if I was doing something totally wrong. Since the silver powder was black and the borax was black, for a minute there when I melted I couldn't tell what was the silver and what was the borax! The process was frustrating at times but really cool to see the end result even if it is just a BB. I know it will get easier with more experience.

Is there anyone else working on this project? What kinds of results are you getting?

Thanks,
Birdflu78

 

[mjgraham]

Well just to try a test I have had these fuses caps sitting around for a while to big to eat up in acid so I put two ends in and ran 60V at about 1.4A for a while there were about 1mm apart and it did deplate one of them,so I decided to try with just a piece of 304ss as the neg electrode and just wired them to the positive been running at 60V 0.4A for a while they are de plating some of the plating actually peels off when rubbed on now, but this makes a lot of heat. I did start with distilled water and it does conduct some anyway aparently. At this power it comes off pretty quickly going to go a couple of hours and just see the area that goes away, although the water temp is getting about 160F only in a about 500ml water. Makes a lot of fluffy material for sure.
Just interesting.

 

[butcher]

mjgraham,
With these voltages no wonder the water heats up :lol:

 

[mjgraham]

That is true, while it did seem to work, I had some silver plated end caps from fuses, I decided to experiment too much and lost track. I had seen a video where some one was removing rust using washing soda in water and two pieces of metal, did try that and it worked so I tried adding s super small amount. Well we went from 0.5A at ~60V to 16.7A (max) at 33V , needless to say it got hot (550 watts of power) but made a mess of things, it might just be as with most thing slow and easy works best.

 

[cheechQ]

Thanks modtheworld44 for showing us your cell. I tryed it myself and this is what i got so far. Not sure how to upload video on here so here the link http://youtu.be/wn6mSyExcVc

Tell me what you think?

power is 12V/10amps battery charger
water/ tap

Thank you jimdoc

 

[jimdoc]

Thanks modtheworld44 for showing us your cell. I tryed it myself and this is what i got so far. Not sure how to upload video on here so here the link [youtube]http://youtu.be/wn6mSyExcVc[/youtube]

Tell me what you think?

power is 12V/10amps battery charger
water/ tap

You have to leave space around the link;

http://youtu.be/wn6mSyExcVc

 

[Geo]

how cool is that? now you need to find out if its silver chloride or silver oxide.in my opinion, it actually could be a combination of both.

 

[modtheworld44]

Thanks modtheworld44 for showing us your cell. I tryed it myself and this is what i got so far. Not sure how to upload video on here so here the link http://youtu.be/wn6mSyExcVc

Tell me what you think?

power is 12V/10amps battery charger
water/ tap

Thank you jimdoc

cheechQ

Done check your video comments.Now return the favor and tell me what you think.You can post what you think here or in your video comments.



modtheworld44

 

[modtheworld44]

how cool is that? now you need to find out if its silver chloride or silver oxide.in my opinion, it actually could be a combination of both.

Geo

If he stirs it and makes it turn black then uses just a little hcl it will show that its not silver chloride and should have a purple color to it.

The batch of hcl/cl that you told me to heat for an hour,is now getting fully evaporated because the longer I left it cooking the more gold that dropped out.It's dropped way more than I ever expected to see and I haven't even finish getting the rest out of the AR portion yet.Its looking real good on these final results,I'll know for sure tomorrow when I finish up.



modtheworld44

 

[cheechQ]

yes i agree the prosses is slow, i am still new to all this so i have some questions.
1) how would you tell the difference between the two silver cloride & oxide?
2) when i started the cell today after work it powder on the bottom was a white color and as it was running the powder turn to a greyish color any ideas?

i really like it. it seem to be working so far. tomorrow i am going to try to test some of the powder. Mixed in with the powder looks to be very small silver looking pieces.
what would be the best way to test it.This is my second time at this the first time was in a small pyrex about 3" tall and the powder i got for that was a greyish color and more like clay then powder.
I took some of the powder and mixed it with muriatic acid and it dissolved it then i add a little water and its like it came back out but different looking.
I am going to do the test again but take pic this time well post tomorrow.

Hope the other cells your working on come out good

Thanks again for your input

 

[Geo]

bright light will cause silver chloride to turn dark, even black.

 

[cheechQ]

Here's a video of my cell after running for about 3 days and of some silver i got at the end of the video. The only thing is that it doesn't look like modtheworld44 cell.
I don't see the silver dopping out. The silver at the end of the video could have some silver from other melts. I'm going to order some new crucibles to melt it in to get
the right weight.
http://youtu.be/qUQylloaIQE

 

[birdflu78]

I took a break from this but now I'm back at it. There is almost an inch of silver chloride in the bottom of my one gallon pitcher after just a few pieces of silverware. There is also some green copper precipitate mixed in with it. Is it possible to remove the copper from my solids before or after converting the AgCl to silver powder? Looks like dissolving solids in nitric and cementing the silver is the best way but I'm not ready for that yet. Maybe I'll process until I get enough material to make the purchase of nitric worthwhile.

AgCl turns dark purple and eventually black from exposure to light. Wikipedia states that AgCl decomposes to elemental silver on exposure to light. AgCl + light -> Ag + Cl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_chloride

This is just a thought, but if this is true then is light exposure a viable method for AgCl conversion? Just place the material under a powerful light or out in the sunlight and let it convert?

 

[butcher]

I do not think light would be a viable method, light will convert some of the silver salt to silver, but much of the silver chloride would not get converted easily, as light would not penetrate down into the crystals or inside the silver crystals or to the silver chloride that is not exposed to light.

This works fine in photography but would work poorly in recovering and refining silver.

 

[jmdlcar]

Hi,

How is your process doing? Have you use Sterling Silver yet?

Jack