Silver precipitation w Copper

[kreinhardt]

Purified and distilled are definitely not the same thing. Purification is to remove contaminants, but doesn't necessarily give you pure H2O. Distilled water should only be H2O, no minerals, no contaminants. Cannot say for certain that your issue has been caused by this, but that is the simplest and most obvious answer.

 

[cejohnsonsr1]

Yes. It’s an issue. Non distilled water contains chlorine. That milky stuff is most likely silver chloride. You need to start over with distilled water. Sorry for the bad news, but hopefully you caught it early. The blue tint in your electrolyte is, indeed, copper and is completely normal.

 

[buckrogers1]

before starting again with a silver cell, i want to get as close to having pure silver . My problem i noticed is that when i dissolve my silverware and scrap in nitric my solution is dark green, indicating way too much copper, that when i precipitate the silver with copper bars, i still get copper residue in the silver cement. is it possible to avoid this by precipitating silver with a Chloride ? So i'm dealing with Silver Chloride instead , that should be way purer ? A chloride does not react with the copper in the solution correct? I can easily break up the Silver Chloride in the sun (i live in florida ) and then melt the Silver Oxide . Is my reasoning correct? Or will i still have copper precipitating. I'm asking as i have several gallons of material dissolved in nitric, that would be the fastest way to get results. Am i right?

 

[Yggdrasil]

before starting again with a silver cell, i want to get as close to having pure silver . My problem i noticed is that when i dissolve my silverware and scrap in nitric my solution is dark green, indicating way too much copper, that when i precipitate the silver with copper bars, i still get copper residue in the silver cement. is it possible to avoid this by precipitating silver with a Chloride ? So i'm dealing with Silver Chloride instead , that should be way purer ? A chloride does not react with the copper in the solution correct? I can easily break up the Silver Chloride in the sun (i live in florida ) and then melt the Silver Oxide . Is my reasoning correct? Or will i still have copper precipitating. I'm asking as i have several gallons of material dissolved in nitric, that would be the fastest way to get results. Am i right?

The easiest is to process the Chloride wet, with NaOH and sugar or weak Sulphuric and Iron.
It can be smelted directly with Sodium Carbonate or Bicarbonate as flux. Can’t remember which, but losses are higher than the wet route.

 

[cejohnsonsr1]

before starting again with a silver cell, i want to get as close to having pure silver . My problem i noticed is that when i dissolve my silverware and scrap in nitric my solution is dark green, indicating way too much copper, that when i precipitate the silver with copper bars, i still get copper residue in the silver cement. is it possible to avoid this by precipitating silver with a Chloride ? So i'm dealing with Silver Chloride instead , that should be way purer ? A chloride does not react with the copper in the solution correct? I can easily break up the Silver Chloride in the sun (i live in florida ) and then melt the Silver Oxide . Is my reasoning correct? Or will i still have copper precipitating. I'm asking as i have several gallons of material dissolved in nitric, that would be the fastest way to get results. Am i right?

Your Sterling Silver is 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper, so there’s no way to have too much copper in your solution. It will always be the same ratio of the component metals. It’s at this point where you can begin to separate the metals and recover the silver for further refining. You can use the sugar and lye method and probably get a somewhat more pure product, but the fact is you have to go through a couple more steps, it costs more and takes longer and presents more opportunities for something to go wrong. And here’s the kicker. There will still be copper contamination. It’s cheaper, less time consuming and a much simpler process to just cement it out on copper and rinse the mud as thoroughly as you can before going on the silver cell. The cell is the only practical way to remove the last of the copper, regardless of the amount of contamination (the difference between the two methods isn’t really that great when you consider that either way will still require the exact same further processing).