Copper Metal Crystals?

[@ScrapScience]

Not the greatest project I've done lately, but not every experiment can be a winner. Also, Scrap Science now has a Discord server! You should join us and chat about electrochemistry and projects here: discord.gg/m76mHpvdGW

[@peterteatree]

I think it’s just as valuable to upload your experiments when they don’t go as you’d hoped, as it is to upload the ones that go perfectly. It introduces concepts and ideas, and demonstrates an approach which can be taken forward by others or improved on by yourself. So thank you for sharing! Keep it up I love your channel

[@vivekyadav]

Yes very few KZbinrs do that now a days

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

I've done a bunch of electroplating and electroforming of copper for SC and EFP liners. There are a whole bunch of factors and conditions required to get the results you want. Copper chemistry is awesome. 50-100ma may have given you bigger distinct crystals.

[@BigParadox]

I think, for a first simple attempt, this gave a nice result. In the microscope pictures you could clearly see the flat surfaces of crystals. Really cool! Thank you!

They're pretty anyway! Have you seen sreetips's silver cell? He uses a stainless steel bowl cathode, silver nitrate solution, and a dirty silver anode of silver at 3.5 Volts constant voltage. His cells pull about 2.5 A with maybe a couple liters volume and make kilograms of silver crystals in about 10 days. I love electrochemistry! Keep exploring!

[@ibewatchinu]

i like copper

[@FranciscoJavierGC6101]

me 2

[@6alecapristrudel]

big fan of copper

[@whatthefunction9140]

I like money

[@TomsBackyardWorkshop]

When I do this I'm going to use a large metal pot as the anode and suspend the cathode in the middle.

[@micahmcnulty7853]

Cool but this can only work if the anode is copper

[@Convolutedtubules]

Have you seen Les' Lab recent video on growing crystals? I feel like some of the methods can be used here too, like agitating the solution constantly.

[@johnnyporker8837]

It looks like the world's most painful kidney stone

[@DobleWhiteAndStanley]

I used copper deposition to plug cast iron crack and then melt it into the crack.

[@WaffleStaffel]

They still turned out good. IMHO the most beautiful crystals are grown from sublimation or chemical transport type methods. They display the unexpected, natural beauty of metals we ordinarily think of as plain grey sheets/lumps.

[@RetrogradeGloom]

When I was a kid my dad worked at a factory that used an electroplating process, but the copper crystalized into awesome snowflake-like trees rather than the typical nodules. I gifted my best sample to my life sciences teacher in junior high. I wish I still had some, they were amazing. I never found out why they were so differently shaped. He said it was pure copper though.

[@gert_kruger]

Lol, I've grown dendrites like those over night trying to copper plate leaves. The challenge with electroplating objects is to not get dendrites like the one you achieved. I don't think the hypothesis of increasing the relative distance of the microscopic dendrite is actually at play. The sharp point of the dendrite will act as an electron emitter regardless. To get smooth plating you can add some glycerol and a pulsed power supply. A pulsed voltage increases the throwing power of the plating. Cheers!

[@ScrapScience]

Yeah I think a lot of my assumptions about how to do this were wrong. It was pretty annoying waiting for so long without taking the copper out of the cell and then seeing something that didn't even look different to a dendrite that would grow in less than a day. Oh well. Thanks for the ideas! I'll give it a go if I try this again (though that's unlikely for the foreseeable future).

[@gert_kruger]

I have to mention that the pH and temperature control is also important.

[@gert_kruger]

@@ScrapScience I think you should look at the copper sulfate pourbaix diagram. Plating metals can sometimes be a bit more tricky than dissolving the anode and bringing it back to a solid state, especially if the metals are too reactive and would rather form oxides rather than be reduced back to metal. For example, have you ever heard of titanium being plated onto another metal? Not in aqueous solution, but it has been accomplished electrochemically using ionic liquid method (lower temperature than molten salts). Metal plating can be fun, there is a bit of an art vs science due to many factors influencing the outcome. Often times something textbook doesn't work as you think it should only to find that you need to add some obscure/secret additive to get the desired outcome.

[@Buzz_Purr]

I've used a copper acetate solution with some glycerol (about 5%). The glycerol makes the crystals much less brittle.

[@TheStigma]

Really cool! I will definitely give this a go - since I'm already into plating (making everything from scratch). A lot of these same principles in your cell apply just in general for getting an even coverage in plating generally, though this is probably extra sensitive. A slowly rotating hook to hang things from can be a great method, and very cheaply DIYable with minimal electronics skills.

[@Sk8rdad420]

Why did we not answer any of the questions posed in the beginning.?

[@ScrapScience]

They were just there to provoke thought. I hope they’ll stick with you.

[@FranciscoJavierGC6101]

nice 4 ​@@ScrapScience, nice 4 our 🧠

[@Sk8rdad420]

@@ScrapScience well they drove me to comment and increase engagement so nice work there. I did acutely google a few of the questions. Long time subscriber here so appreciate what you do. Just don't put yourself down when the results aren't what you would have liked. The close up shots of the copper crystals where awesome.

[@mcwolfbeast]

I've been able to grow similar copper crystals (much larger though) with a simple single-tub setup and much higher amperage in a matter of 2 weeks, actually as an unintended result of trying to purify copper (with an acidified copper sulphate electrolyte). I think 1 mA is a bit too low, tbh; unless you're hoping to reproduce natural crystal growth but that takes years...

[@ScrapScience]

Yeah. I just assumed 'slower is better', but maybe I'll rethink that if I try this again...

[@ZoonCrypticon]

Perhaps you should have increased the current density to achieve bigger crystals. I assume, that the threshold level for imperfections is still above the values you had set in. Crystal growth is also dependent on temperature. Cooling the solution and increasing current flow.

[@christopherleubner6633]

If you want lots of big copper crystals start with copper sheet. Heat to bright red heat and cool slowly. Next eat the oxide off with acid till its shiny and bright. Then use that as your cathode. For the anode use a bunch of thick copper wire. For the electrolyte use a mix of a copper salt, preferably nitrate and add ammonia till the solution becomes a vivid blue. The copper amine complex favors crystalline growth rather than dendritic growth. ❤

[@stamasd8500]

You didn't do anything wrong but there are ways to improve the process. I did the experiment myself a few years ago, let it run for about 5 months and ended up with a nice almost spherical aggregate of interwoven copper crystals. I didn't use a contraption like yours, just a 500ml beaker with 2 anodes surrounding a central cathode. As constant current source I used a JFET in constant current configuration (gate connected to source, and selected for an Idss of around 1mA). The major changes I did as compared to your run were: I used a low concentration of copper sulfate, around 10g/L IIRC; and I limited the surface of the cathode exposed to the electrolyte by plunging just the end of the wire in about 2mm. That worked quite well in the end. When it was done I cleaned the crystal mass with toluene, and sprayed several layers of a clear lacquer.

[@jorgenskyt]

It's nice you upload experiments that "fails". We can learn a lot from failures. We must embrace our failures more than our successes 🙂 Maybe instead of a copper rod you could try a more point-like cathode (insulated copper wire, with a sharp cut, exposing only mayby 0.1-0.5 mm2 to the electrolyte) to make sure that the deposition is more concentrated. And then sloooowly increase the current, related to the growing surface area over days and weeks ... at the lowest practical temperature. With some slow, but steady steering of the electrolyte solution. Just a thought 🙂

[@ignilc]

Well, i liked the video

[@gsestream]

thats why you put extra sulfuric acid on the electroplating (external or generated in the electrolysis) to convert the dendrites back to copper sulfate. the positive electrode can be graphite and not copper, so your source of copper is the solution and not the metal electrode itself. also that makes the sulfuric acid generation on the fly and oxygen at the graphite electrode. just use extra sulfuric acid and super low current, in the milliamperes range. then all dendrites will be dissolved and a strong film of copper metal will form. yep the semiconductor copper oxide will conduct. its also kinda a super capacitor battery at the same time. yep copper - air (graphite) battery. very low voltage but still. each dendrite has high surface area along the dendrite, so it gets eaten faster than the object foil surface. or thin dendrite lines, which get dropped to the bottom of the electrolyte container very fast. if you get pink copper film then you done it right. lab power supply has the current voltage limiter built-in. you could also just use a potentiometer or static resistor to get your fixed current. pure copper non-oxidized is pink. metallic copper brown is not pure copper, its covered with the semiconductor oxides partly, but better than the black, worse than the pink. when using the graphite electrode, you will always get the extra sulfuric acid to keep the pink color during the whole process. this is a very practical copper part manufacturing process. very exciting.

[@iNerdier]

Would you be willing to take a request? I've got jugs of photographic fix in from making prints and I always wondered what the steps would be to use electrolysis to recover some of it and maybe make jewellery out of it. Any chance you might look into that some time?

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

You should be able to use pretty much the exact same process as shown.

[@AdricM]

fun to see. i was doing that to get tin from pewter.

[@pvc988]

I wonder about its electric properties. Are they the same as for regular copper or are there some differences?

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

It's just copper, same properties.

[@pvc988]

@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 Graphite and diamond are also just carbon…

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

@pvc988 yes, but they have different structures. This is just regular copper.

[@ScrapScience]

Unless you go to the effort of making an amorphous structure, "regular copper" is still always crystalline to some degree - the crystals are just very small. Having bigger crystals doesn't meaningfully change the electrical properties. It just looks cool :)

[@5467nick]

You can realistically get something like a 10% reduction in electrical resistance, maybe a little more, with macroscopic crystals versus the nanoscale crystals most metal materials have. It's certainly not enough to justify the extreme price hike of manufacturing copper wire that way for almost any application.

[@6alecapristrudel]

By god sir! Metal plating not interesting? I hereby challenge you to get some nice and shiny copper deposits. How about plating objects that are not conductive? Electroforming is basically spawning metal shapes out of a jar of acid and copper. Mirror bright plating? Trying to DIY cyanide-free silver/gold? There are so many possibilities!

[@experiments_everyday]

This is quite a nice copper crystal, just not big enough. Why don't you try again? I did the same experiment too and I managed to get a pretty sizable crystal, I mean, it was a lot bigger than this and it took a lot less time too. In fact the only two things that limited the size of my crystal were the amount of raw copper available to me and time, since I did not have a setup safe enough to run the cell at night. Still, I definitely did not take 60 days and I only ran the cell during daytime. I used a much higher current, 300mA, I think. The only problem with it is that the crystal is very fragile, so you have to find a sweet spot, where the current isn't too low, but isn't too high. As for the oxidation problem, I quite liked the colour of the oxide, so I deliberately oxidized it to a purple colour and then coated it with super glue so that it does not oxidize further. It is definitely possible to make a crystal larger than that, and in lesser time too, the structure of the crystal may be slightly different, but it will definitely still produce those wonderful dendrites. Be sure to try this experiment again, it's such an easy experiment. After all this channel has an incredible history of doing really complex experiments and this is a relatively simple one.

[@victorc.e]

DIOS QUE TOC LA VOZ, no lo traduzcas porfavor

[@Convolutedtubules]

Hi

[@nunyabisnass1141]

Feom what i can see online, native copper crystals are tiny, like sand grain tiny and rhose took thousands of years. Id say theres a likelihood that it just doesnt want to be larger and there's not a whole lot you can do.

[@HHZHALDUUAM]

I don’t know if wire are monocristals but if they aren’t it is definitely one of the reasons of this semi failure. Also I’m pretty sure the smaller the starting electrode is the better but I have no sources.

[@5467nick]

Copper wire, like almost any metal object you can find anywhere, has a lot of very small crystals. Making monocrystal metal objects is expensive.

[@ff-tw6wv]

I want to watch the clip but I can't understand it.