[anyz]

Hi,
I am not expert in chemistry. Read in high school long ago. Trying to get cooper powder from some cooper wires. I have performed following steps after searching from Internet:

1- 10gm of cooper wires are mixed with 50 ML of Nitric acid
2- When cooper is completely dissolved i get blue solution
3- Mixed 150ml of water in solution
4- Placed a iron strip in solution
5- Cooper starts depositing in bottom.
6- so far so good..
7- Left solution over night hoping to get ~10gm of cooper powder
8- But it is left with greenish solution + precipitate. Very small amount of cooper is gathered; less than 1 gm

I am wondering what mistake i made and could not get the good amount of cooper powder. I used steel container for experiment.

Thanks.

[Arkcon]

Greetings, and welcome to the chemical forums.  Were glad to help up learn, and to do that, I'm going to ask you some questions.

Can you try some experiments to figure this problem out for yourself?

What happens if you try to see the effect if acid on copper over time, or on an iron rod by itself, or a steel container without copper or the iron rod.

[anyz]

I tried three times actually. With different volume of acid, water etc but almost similar results. I was trying to get some hint what went wrong so that i can correct it.

[shiffdaddy]

If you have access to copper sulfate available at most hardware stores you could always make a saturated solution and perform an electrolysis.  This is where most of my copper powder I have no use for came from

[anyz]

@shiffdaddy Got it.
Just curious to know a hint what is going wrong with my experiment. Any hint will very helpful.