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Topic: Problems with silver extraction  (Read 2183 times)

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Offline Tricka90

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Problems with silver extraction
« on: July 20, 2016, 09:23:24 AM »
Hello everybody.  :)
I'm tryng to extract pure silver from a spoon which is 80% silver with the classic procedure of nitration followed by the addition of solid copper to the silver nitrate (AgNO3) solution. I'm a beginner, so I readily made a mistake. I didn't add the copper in the form of a plate or a thick wire, instead I tryed adding a ball of very thin wire (around 0.1 mm). After some hours I didn't find any pure silver powder precipitate in the solution as I should, instead I found the ball of copper wire to be converted into a ball of...silver wire! I'm not sure if that's a good result because I'm afraid that only the outer part of the wire is silver while the inner part is still copper although it's not visible. Of course the wire is so thin that is nearly impossible to establish whether there still copper inside or not.
Do you think is possible that the ball of thin wire I obtained, which has the same characteristic of the copper wire except the color, is pure silver? Or do you think there must be some not negligible quantity of copper inside?
Fortunately there's still a lot of silver in the solution so I'm going to extract it with a better fashion.
« Last Edit: July 20, 2016, 09:35:05 AM by Tricka90 »

Offline Intanjir

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Re: Problems with silver extraction
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2016, 01:40:59 PM »
What is normally supposed to happen? I guess the silver comes out as fragile needle-like crystals which can be broken off from the bulk wire and you collect these?

If it just looks like an intact wire then I would guess you have merely plated the wire. Give the tip a good scraping with steel and then see if you can't get it to make some vividly colored copper oxide. Easiest way is with a 9 volt and another wire and some electrolyte.

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