Metal from Water - Recovery of metallic Tin from Solution by Electrolysis 

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I added HCl to the alloy of Tin and lead and dissolved both metals at the same time. However I believe the lead has dissolved less and was left as a solid which I then filtered off. Then I did electrolysis to the clear solution. I am not sure how good the separation between both metals is because I have no easy way of testing the purity. I simply precipitated the metal out of solution from the ions by electrolysis. So there were dissolved Sn2+ Ions in the solution and they gained electrons at the cathode forming elementary Sn Metal. I assumed the dissolved lead should only precipitate after the tin has finished.

Hello, Thanks for watching and for your comment. I used graphite electrodes. For the kathode you could use any metal which is resistant to the solution. The anode however might get corroded if not made from noble metal. My graphite electrodes also disintigrated quite a lot, however the created graphite dust did not bother me as it should not be a problem for the purity of the metal.

What do you mean with this?

Thanks for watching :) I do no longer know the voltage or current. I started with a very low voltage of only 1.2 V. But I increased it because it took too long. After some time I also increased the current to more than 1 A I think. Just try it out, not much can go wrong.

@@Flederratte cool. Thanks for the advice! I have a 30V, 10amp bench top power supply that I will be using. If I remember to do it, I will let you know how it goes. Or you may see my post about it in instagram. I saw where you followed me on there. Giving you a follow back, my good sir.

@@BackYardScience2000 10 A power supply is awesome! Remember to protect the electronics from corrosive gasses like chlorine or HCl. My power supply is a little damaged because of the corrosive environment in my lab. Now I store all volatile corrosive stuff in separate plastic containers with lids and additional plastic bags around the bottles. Yes I follow you on Instagram but I am not very active there, so I might not see it right away.

Not really. Determination of impurities is not an application for electrolysis. However it is possible to extract a large quantity of dissolved metal ions and transform it back to the metallic form.

@@Flederratte can we find small traces of metal ions in rivers?

@@hezu2013 sure. Many of the metals are common in form of ions in water. But not enough to react them to metal in a useful way.

@@Flederratte im working on a research paper and i want to know if we can extract metals even at small amounts from rivers just like in the video.

@@hezu2013 What I do in the video is called electrolysis. I used electrical current to react metal cations (positive charge) to their elemental form (no charge). If there were no metal ions present in the water the electrolysis would simply split water molecules to H2 and O2. This will also happen if the concentration of metal ions is very low or the voltage is too high. Also there are a lot of unwanted ions in water which would also be collected. In theory it is possible to extract charged ions with the electric field. It would not be practicable or cost effective.

Thanks :) It actually was a solder of 60% tin and 40% lead. I tried to get rid of the lead this way and have pure tin. I still have to try if it is really lead free now. Also I do not know where the green color came from. There might have been a bit of copper wire which was also dissolved by the hydrochloric acid on air.

@@Flederratte hello! How much % tin you have at the end ?

@@tomdgr9767 I do not know. I have no method to test the purity

Yes it was an alloy with 40% lead. I could not check if it was separated. I am still looking for a way to test for lead. I will update you when I have a result, please do the same when you figured out how to separate the two metals.

@@Flederratte Ok. I saw your comment on the CanadianChemist (I think?), and I agree his method seems wayyyyy too complicated. I'm doing electrolysis right now to see if it does anything. But tin and lead are in the same group, so I have a feeling they will both be in the tree thing on the cathode (negative).

@@jhyland87 Yes they probably are. The problem also is they have a very similar electric potential. Let me know if you find out something.

@@Flederratte Oh man, I was going to follow up on this with some results. I got some lead/tin solder, then got rid of the rosin flux, and was dissolving some of it in HCl to get tin chloride and lead chloride. I was going to see if I could use acetone to separate the two, since tin chloride is soluble but lead chloride isn't. Then disaster struck... I was moving my flask over and just barely tapped the bottom on the corner of my hotplate, busted a hole in the bottom, soluble lead salts and concentrated HCL all over the damn place. Fucking disaster... lol. I may start over, but not sure when. Maybe you can give that a shot. I saw it commented somewhere in the SM forums, seemed worthy of a shot.

@@jhyland87 Thanks for the follow up! Too bad it did not work like planned. I never thought about solubility in acetone, it is an interesting method. Did you mix the acid solution of the metal clorides directly with acetone? Did some precipitate fall out?

Yes. I am sorry. Either I did not film it or I lost the video files. It was nothing special. I just poured into a mold of stainless steel. You can see me pouring lead in some of my other videos, looks very similar.