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Silver
Silver
has always fascinated me. The metal has many strange and
beautiful properties and is a pleasure to work with on the
wet bench. The following are some of my researches into
the morphology of silver deposits. NewC listmember Nick
Reiter has been kind enough to furnish some time on the
electron microscope for a closer look at some of the silver
structures presented here.
While
one can buy the CP grade silver nitrate, it's easy and cheap
to make a large quantity of technical grade with scrap silver
and nitric acid. Chop up the silver into small chunks, and
heat it gently in a Pyrex beaker filled with enough nitric
acid and water to cover the metal. Do this in a fume hood
or outside where there is sufficient ventilation. Filter
the cold solution to remove the unreacted material. Warm
it to drive off water and saturate the solution. The silver
nitrate will crystallize out on when the hot solution is
cooled. Pour off the mother liquor (use it with more acid
to dissolve silver at a later date) and wash the crystals.
A purer product can be produced by recrystallizing from
water. The crystals are snow white and odorless.
I
have observed a strange thing dissolving silver in nitric
acid. When using an old silver ashtray as source material,
I noticed an unusual blue plasma-like discharge at the cut
tips of the metal. The phenomena persisted until the metal
was consumed. Perhaps an alloying metal in the silver was
responsible, as I hadn't noticed the effect with pure silver
(yet). Can the produced hydrogen burn without explosion?
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