Electrolysis sodium chloride, copper probes

[jsatan]

Hi, I'm new around here, done some reading but it's always better to ask.

 

I've been playing around with Electrolysis as it's interesting, (why else would someone does it, lol )

 

I setup my solution which is water plus salt and then used copper probes.

 

I got a black slugged which I've now filtered and allowing to dry on a plain of glass, what is this stuff?

 

Copper hydroxide?

Copper chloride?

 

Are something completely different?

 

Thanks for any feed back.

 

Also on a side note I was reading about making copper sulphate using sulfuic acid, could you make sulfuric acid by adding sulfur to water?

 

I'm buying som copper sulphate off ebay very cheep.

 

I have phosphoric acid would this make copper phosphate which can be used in copper plating with the use of Electrolysis?

 

Best regards Jonathan.

[Rob]

yeah, if you electrolyse aqueous (CuSO4 in water) Copper Sulphate with copper electrodes then you should get copper stuck to the electrodes and a (sulpur trioxide?) solution (or gas, im not quite sure) which when added to water would get you sulphuric acid. I think ... which kind of makes redundant the whole adding SO3 to water to make H2SO4 to make the CuSO4 that you need to make the sulphur trioxide.

[John Cuthber]

yeah, if you electrolyse aqueous (CuSO4 in water) Copper Sulphate with copper electrodes then you should get copper stuck to the electrodes and a (sulpur trioxide?) solution (or gas, im not quite sure) which when added to water would get you sulphuric acid. I think ... which kind of makes redundant the whole adding SO3 to water to make H2SO4 to make the CuSO4 that you need to make the sulphur trioxide.

 

Wrong in every major aspect.

 

The black stuff in the OP might be copper oxide or just copper. It's hard to tell without rather more information.

Adding sulphur to water won't get you anything but wet sulphur. If you search this site for sulphuric acid I suspect you will find out how it can be made.

[salter]

I have done plenty of experiments with electrolysis myself... when i used salt water and copper electrodes i got orange and green in the water, which has the right color for copper chloride... idk what you are doing that is giving the different result (could be additives in salt), but i do know that if you use sodium hydroxide instead of sodium chloride you don't get anything but hydrogen and oxygen gas. I also tried to avoid getting salts or whatever they are using different electrodes and i found that anything i could get my hands on (i was going to do platinum but didnt feel like spending much money) created something.

 

 

 

As for sulfuric acid, copper sulfate will make it in water. I found that one out the hard way in the bottom of a mine shaft... we were collecting long blue hairs of the stuff to sell and the dust settled on my skin and when i sweated it wasn't exactly fun. lol

[salter]

one more thing.

The fact that no wierd colors appeared in the solution when NaOH was used instead of NaCl suggests that the colors that appeared in the NaCl solution must include Cl (or Na), as they are the only real difference. Either way it isn't copper oxide as suggested above, it is cupric chloride or whatever else.