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Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Pine Beach, NJ

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Recovery of silver from spent electrolyte

one of our customer has good volume of spent Silver electrolyte which they want to recover silver from it as use of this bath has been made redundant. Could you please suggest some suitable method to recover silver from it locally.

K M M Abubacker
chemical supplier for PCB industry - Bangalore, Karnataka, India
May 22, 2011

Hi, Maheen.

Electrolytic recovery is probably best because it does not involve added chemicals, and it plates out silver metal rather than generating a chemical reaction product which requires additional operations to recover the silver. But it is limited in that the efficiency of deposition starts dropping as the concentration of remaining silver drops, and you may not get too far without a specialty electrolytic cell designed with copious agitation, and very large cathode area in close proximity to the anodes. Make sure that you have excellent ventilation to guard against hydrogen cyanide exposure. Good luck.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
May 24, 2011

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