Making Silver Metal from an Antique Chemical
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 มี.ค. 2022
- For this video i purchased some antique French pharmacy/chemist bottles that contain silver gluconate. Compared to the silver content they were pretty decently priced and i bought them to see if i can get the silver metal and make a profit.
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Disclaimer: not meant as a guide, my procedure is not the most optimal or the safest - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
This gives me old school nile red vibes, which is a good thing. Glad to see another chemistry youtuber enter the scene!
I'm thinking Doug's Lab, personally. :-) Hopefully it catches on a little better than his channel did.
Always glad to see a new chemistry TH-camr. So far we have Nile Red, The chemical institute at Nottingham a couple of others, the Exploritirium the Royal Society and this new TH-camr. He and Nile Red are serious about making chemicals and suggest ways of doing it.
Are there any other new chem youtubers?
He basically copied Nile Red 🤷🏻♂️
Given how smart this video was up until the end- I can't believe you tipped molten silver out on the floor 😅 just slowly poor it into a big bucket of water next time! No clean up needed, gives you silver shot pellets 😎
And, with the bucket-of-water cooling method, there's no possibility of carbon (soot) contamination: as can be seen in the video, organic residues like dirt, dust, paint, grease, etc, on the concrete floor immediately pyrolysed and off-gassed flammable organic gasses, which burst into flame as soon as they made contact with oxygen. If combustion of the organic residues was incomplete, it is possible that some carbon (soot) would be trapped in the silver metal as it cools and solidifies.
Good idea
Just watched a handful of your videos. surprised your not more popular, definitely catches my interest
They've really good aren't they?
This is a new channel about 11 months old. Give him time to grow. His content is well presented.
I refined a lot of silver. You would have been better off just adding copper metal to the silver nitrate and let the silver plate out on the copper. I try to avoid AgCl, but when I go that route, you never want that stuff to dry up, since it turns into a brick and heating it to convert it, a lot of the AgCl will evaporate away before it converts. If you have to go the AgCl way, it works out a lot better to add NaOH to the WET AgCl to convert to silver oxide, then just add sugar to convert the oxide to silver metal.
Exactly! It is best to reduce the silver to a copper spiral.
most of your yield loss was when you poured off the excess fluid from the silver nitrate solution after participating out silver chloride.
I had the unfortunate task of recycling silver chloride into silver metal in grad school so I can give some tips. Your yield was low because AgCl doesn’t really convert into silver metal very easily. The best way I’ve found is to grind up AgCl with excess sodium carbonate and borax in a blender and heat it to 600C for at least 2 hours stirring occasionally to break up lumps. This will be the best way to convert the AgCl into powdered Ag metal which can then be fused at the melting point of silver.
I read that when smelting silver chloride a lot of silver goes up in fume, but less so when reduced with carbon (I realise a carbon crucible was employed). That method of converting to silver oxide with lye then elemental silver with sugar would have surely improved yield. And instead of concrete you could slowly pour into a bucket of cold water to make silver shot. Or make a green sand mould with sand and clay. Entertaining video though, thank you. The unboxing of the old packaging was wonderful.
Silver is significantly volatile at furnace temperature?
@@karlbergen6826 For elemental silver, generally speaking, no, but it depends on the furnace. Some get very hot. And eventually every fixed thing gets hot enough to vaporize. Wikipedia says, Melting point: 1234.93 K (961.78 °C, 1763.2 °F); Boiling point: 2435 K (2162 °C, 3924 °F)
It's much easier to treat the silver chloride with lye and sugar. The lye converts the silver chloride to silver oxide which then reacts with the sugar to form silver metal. Burning silver chloride releases a lot of chlorine to the air and possibly silver as well. Pour the silver into a bucket of cold water instead of onto the concrete to make 'silver shot'. Thinking about it it would be easier to just mix the silver gluconate with salt water and filter out the silver chloride and save all the acid.
Before i did this video i did some tests with the silver gluconate to see what would work. I honestly expected that adding a strong acid (HCl) to the silver gluconate would also produce gluconic acid and silver chloride, but surprisingly it didn't do anything. I would expect the gluconate ion (conjugated base of a weak acid) to take up the proton of the HCl, but i guess not. Silver gluconate definitely doesn't react with NaCl, it is surprisingly stable and only very concentrated nitric acid reacted with it properly. I didn't go for the sugar method because i was unsure of its efficiency. I was also considering doing the reaction with copper metal but i didn't have enough copper on hand. Silver chloride is definitely a pain to convert, if i ever make silver again in the future i will do one of the more direct chemical methods to get silver powder.
@@Chemiolis my next silver batch, I’ll be using vitamin C to convert silver nitrate to silver directly.
> Casually pours molten silver onto concrete floor
Ah yes my favorite type of chemistry
I think a stone prepared for it will work better and give cleaner results and no mark on the floor.
I’ve been subscribed for about a month now and it’s crazy to see how fast your channel has grown. You only had around 400 subscribers when I first found the channel, but now you have over 3 thousand. I think this channel is going to blow up if you keep putting out such interesting content. Well done!
A year later, almost 60k subs. Good progress I would say!
I am your 375th subscriber. Looking forward to your future videos. Keep it up and your channel will pop off for sure. Content is really good!
💯% awesome job!!! Well put together!
Lol, glad you mentioned the bottles, my initial response when you opened it was "hey, those are some pretty nifty antique bottles, you could probably get a fair price for those alone.
This lad came outta no where , YT Chem FTW
Silver gluconate was once commonly used as a topical disinfectant. It would probably still be used in some settings if it wasn't so expensive.
Very cool. A muffin tin or other small baking dish works well as a cheap bar mold. If you ever do something similar again, it would save you a lot of time on the cleanup and give you a better yield in the end (since your metal would be in one large lump - less surface area = less material removed during cleaning and no ugly bits that are uncleanable).
Thank you for the video!
Great youtuber love these types of vids
I would do it in a different way with significantly higher yield. you need just need to convert AgNO3 to Ag2O which forms precipitate and after filtration you need to dissolve it in nitric acid again, evaporate it, get AgNO3 crystals that at high temperature will decompose to pure Ag + NO2 +O2
You don't need to dissolve it back into nitric acid, unless this is part of a purification step. Silver oxide by itself will decompose to 4 Ag and O2, and at a somewhat lower temperature. You can also reduce it to silver by adding dextrose or formic acid to hot, wet, alkaline silver oxide.
i love your videos....I was just wondering if it might be more advantageous for you to convert wet silver chloride using lye to silver oxide....and sugar to convert the oxide to elemental silver powder for melting
Awesome video ❤
Why did you convert the nitrate to chloride? Had you treated the silver nitrate with NaOH, insoluble silver oxide precipitates out. You can then heat the Ag2O to 300C and convert it to silver metal, and there's no chlorine gas involved.
oooooh boy just saw you in my recommended after watching some NileRed. Holy crap you're gonna blow up.
That has not been done before I think. Very cool video.
Even in person, silver chloride looks like forbidden cream cheese
Those bottles are so nice looking
Unfortunately there is neither a year of production given, nor a certificate for quality. I do not have any idea what the use of silvergluconate was, but the bottles with their ground stoppers apear to be from the period between 1910 to 1940. Anyway, silver as an element has no "best before" date.
Check how this man will gain 5k+ subscribers weekly. Nice job the concept of profit chemistry is pretty interesting. Of course it would be nice to take into account the lung damage from all the solvents :).
ive been making colloidal silver water for a decade now using electrolysis ..but recently i tried making colloidal silver oil. didnt work. the silver ions from the 2 silver rods arent released by electrolysis when dipped in oil. can u explain why? also can try to making colloidal silver oil if its even possible. i eventually made colloidal silver oil but i did by making the cs water, evaporating the water, and taking the remaining silver residue powder and mixing it with mct oil. i got the end result but the process was time consuming since i had to air dry the evaporation process since i couldnt use heat to evaporate the water since heat might of caused the silver ions to melt and bond together which negates the purpose.
Hi teacher, I don't understand English, I have a question for you, what was the first substance that you poured on silver sulphide, c6h11, what is that substance, please tell me
SILVER FROM SILVER CHLIRUDE
I remember back in my university days there were some big bottles where everyone had put their silver chloride precipitates over a number of years. Finally being to lazy to recover the silver they let a student take the silver choried. He dried it out and mixed it with baking soda and put it into a muffle furnace. The heat drove off water and converted the sodium bicarbonate to sodium carbonate. The sodium carbonate bused and reacted with the sodium carbonate to give silver carbonate which decomposed to silver oxide. At the temperature of the finance the silver oxide decomposed to silver metal which collected into a great ball. No one had expected so much silver would be recovered. The shocked chemistry department wanted the silver back but didn't get it. I saw the mass if silver and it was almost as bug as a softball. It locked like over a kilogram easy.
As a project my high school students converted decades of silver chloride waste into silver nitrate. It was ~$1000 worth. The plague hit and ended school early that year, so we didn't get to finish the project and purify the product. The next fall I went to work getting it all cleaned up to lab grade. As a final step I decided to recrystallize it and while I was heating the solution to dissolve all of the AgNO3, the 1L beaker it was in cracked across the bottom. Destroyed the hotplate-stirrer and spilled $1000 worth of AgNO3 all over the place. The only practical way I could think of to clean up the mess was using salt water. (It was a semi-dissolved slush of AgNO3, which stains everything brown. There was no scooping it up to try to clean it.) In the end, after ~100 man hours (counting my students' work) we managed to convert a pile of silver chloride waste into a slightly smaller pile of chemically purer silver chloride waste (with a dust bunny or two it), a broken hotplate, and a badly stained cabinet. Total cost of chemicals was only a dollar or two, at least, the 1L beaker probably cost more (the hotplate-stirrer DEFINITELY cost more, and trust me, I still hear about it).
@@jasonpatterson8091
That's a shame about your project. I don't know how the school would have reacted to the silver had you fully purified it. One way silver is purified is to electrolytically refine it much like is done with copper. The result will be somewhat soft but a very fine conductor of electricity. If the silver dissolves to give colorless non-hygroscopic silver nitrate if it should be quite pure. Not sure how my friend cleaned up his silver but it looked pure. I was amazed.
Although silver is the best conductor of electricity it corrodes slightly but enough to ruin a microscopic wire as is used in chips and that's why gold is used. Moist chlorine will or even HCl will ruin the gold wires in chips. Always keep electronics away from chlorine or bromine vapors.
@@karlbergen6826 We use a few tens of grams of silver nitrate each year in various labs, so we actually produced silver metal (reduced with NaOH and dextrose) then reacted that with nitric acid to get silver nitrate. At that point it was a matter of cleaning out copper contaminants and getting the acid out of the mix. It worked pretty well up until that beaker popped. :-)
What other substances did you add nitric acid to the silver oxide to dissolve it? I mean, what other acid did you add
I almost cried when you poured it onto the concrete, any moisture trapped inside will instantly turn to steam sending molten metal everywhere. All that equipment and knowledge and you couldn't get a cheap graphite mold of aliexpress?
I did buy one, turned out to be an extremely small mold that wasn't really usable in this case. The concrete didn't give me any problems, it was already scorched from before, but you make a fair point and i will keep it in mind if i do something like this again. It was my first time doing this.
@@Chemiolis Even a cupcake mold from the dollar store is a an acceptable mold just pre heat it
@@Chemiolis i felt my soul die and suck me into pure horrer as i saw all that (expensive) death cheese go on that concrete flooring
cool videos mate. on the way to becoming the new nile red :)
Why didn't you heat the organic salt in the furnace to receive directly silver metal?
How is silver extracted from silver nitrate?
It's interesting to see these chemistry for profit videos, and the nitric acid I'm assuming was made by yourself rather than bought at 90%. I end up using chloroform quite a bit and was wondering if making my own using bleach or pool cleaner (Sodium or Calcium hypochlorite) mixed with acetone and then distilling is possible in your opinion?
That's how I do it. I use a 2L flask with 2 condensers using ice water and an ice bath for the flask. You add the acetone to the calcium hypochlorite and water mixture through the condenser slowly with strong stirring. When the reaction starts it can get really angry and foam a lot. That's the reason for the 2 condensers and it's probably a good idea to add a funnel to the end too because of the foam. I didn't use an ice bath once and it took off so quickly that the foam hit the ceiling, lol. So take it slow and steady. Then once the reaction is complete you distill the chloroform over.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 thanks for the tips, I'll make sure to be careful with the addition! If I could get the hypochlorite dry, instead of inside a water solution, would you recommend adding water or proceeding without the water?
I did make the nitric acid myself, it is actually cheaper since nitric acid can be quite expensive and the purity they sell is not really necessary for me. You can calculate how much it costs to make chloroform vs to buy it and see if it is better to make it yourself.
@@Embattled5211 use water. If you don't the reaction either never starts, or creates so much heat that it'll just blast chloroform vapor through the condenser so fast that you'll lose most of it. I've tried.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 Well it looks like your username is holding up to be true then, I'll take your advice!
You could purify the silver be electrolytic refining.
years ago I electrolysed a silver solution (photo fixer), regrettably I mistakenly used carbon (from dry cells) electrodes, when I should have used a silver cathode but didn't 😞. What I still have is a fine powdery mix of silver & carbon, plus lumps of silver with plenty of carbon mixed in, when I attempted to separate out through melting. Would re-melting with a flux remove the carbon, in which case any recommendations re: flux - borax ?
Not a chemist but sounds like you might want to try and find something that cleanly bonds with carbon to form a gas, that or you could try and let the mix self separate while molten, that that'd surely take hours.
I somewhat doubt you need a flux for the silver since heat destroys silver oxide, and carbon oxides might be more good than bad.
@@kiraangle2823 Thanks for your suggestion. The removal by air/oxygen conversion to CO2 had occurred to me, but I'd incorrectly assumed that when heated in presence of air, more of the silver might oxidise. The Oracle of Wikipedia tells me that above 195 deg. C the equilibrium veers towards dissociation so I need to try that
tabu metal ka nikal jayega kya touch
Likely boiled off quite a bit of silver chloride, much better process would be to convert it into silver oxide and do a reduction with pretty much anything (sugar, rosin from trees, whatever) and melt it down afterwards.
Why didn't you just pour the molten silver into a container with cold water?
Why does the molten mass of silver inflame and bubble when it is poured onto the concrete floor? Is it because the extremely hot molten silver causes organic residues (as dirt/grease, paint, etc) on your concrete floor to immediately pyrolyse (thermally decompose) to release gas-phase volatile organics, which instantaneously combust as soon as they contact oxygen directly above the extremely hot molten mass of silver metal? Is it possible that the incomplete combustion of organic residues in contact with the extremely hot molten silver might contaminate the silver metal with some carbon (soot)? If so, would this contamination decrease the value of the metal obtained?
Probably just trapped air. Better to pour in a bucket of water. I think the contamination is very minimal, it won't easily integrate into the silver, it is quickly solidifying as well.
You could have cemented the silver nitrate solution on some pieces of copper and avoid the silver chloride processing
“My Labor : Invaluable” 😂
Couldn't find much on the pharmaceutical use of this compound. I saw one place that mentioned it was a topical anti-infection/bacterial medication. Anybody else have info?
It's no longer used in pharmacy but it explicit the property of silver interfering with bacterial growth.
I am working a lot with Silver nanoparticles, for pharmacutical application, I would convert that compound to AgNPs. I do also show some experiments on the channel
I would have just kept those bottles on display in my office.
4:38 the forbidden cheese curd
Where did 50% of the yield go? The white vapour from the furnace?
Probably left in solution.
Save all your solutions etc. until you're done. Then if half of the silver is missing check the solutions. Give it another shot.
Sir , does silver gluconate dissolve in water ?
It does, but not extremely well.
@@Chemiolis thanks sir, I want to make it for my alchemy experiment.
Just let the silver solidify in the crucible…
“honestly not to mad about it“
The low yield doesn't surprise me. It seems you discarded your solutions where a lot of silver must have been. The biggest problem was the formation of AgCl which with excess of Cl ions builds a soluble complex.
I think that electrolysis of the silver nitrate as an aqueous solution, to yield dendritic silver, would be a better route in terms of maximising recovery of silver metal. The dendritic silver can always been melted down to give silver in the form of pellets.
Very good observation!
I love your videos and this wasnt any different but bruh why would you pour molten silver on the floor whwjnsjsi😂 amazing work pal much appreciated
Just keep the old school glucinate!
Hey I am new to this channel but as i saw your channel is related to chemistry i sub your channel i think your channel is like nilered's channel i like his video but he takes months to drop new video i found your channel in my recommendation. Keep the good work continues on this channel you will achieve greater heights
Remember me when you get famous
Zonde, je had ze beter dicht kunnen laten. De zilverprijs staat nog lang niet hoog genoeg..
Bist du eig Deutscher?? Wegen Merck und Carl Roth
Im dutch
@@Chemiolis dacht ik al ;)
Do you ever feel bad opening something that old?
I'd pay just for the bottles, they're super cool.
A little, i was considering keeping one but i don't really have any place for it. Other people don't usually care for the contents so it can be resold normally.
I saw Ag and clicked.
Reaction Silver-Mirror is better.
Next time drop the silver into water and make silver shot
this was so weird
My boy please start wearing gloves, they're so cheap!
Always wear polycarbonate goggles. More important than gloves. If you burn of finger tips you can move on (but wear gloves) Don't ever mess with methyl mercury or methyl cadmium. They.are just too dangerous.
GOOD JOB