Lab Notes: Making Copper Sulfate and Electrobonding Wires

In this video we make copper sulfate in large quantities and also repair the sensors in my hotplate stirrer using electrochemical bonding, an alternative to soldering.
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[@batdragon71]

Love the videos. This one should be titled "How a Chemist solves a mechanical problem". In hot environments a simple mechanical wire crimp would have solved your problem or a simple spot weld of the leads. I guess it all comes own to your background, Chemistry = Chemically bond them Mechanical = Mechanically bind them together Electrical = Use high current to fuse them together.

[@htomerif]

Yeah, I do wonder how well this will hold up. I've never even heard of someone using electroplating as a method of bonding anything. If you can't do resistance welding or crimping, it seems like brazing would be the go-to for an electrical connection.

[@hawaiianrobot]

yeah i would've went with a crimp or some connectors, but that's because i'm lazy and hated doing soldering for stuff like car stereos

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@@hawaiianrobot for that crimping is better anyways due to vibration

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[@jonored]

As an alternative to the copper plating trick, you could probably just get some small crimps and a cheap crimping tool and do that kind of repair in a minute or two. You can get basic crimp cylinders without insulation, which given that they're really just a short segment of plated copper tube, should hold up quite well in the hot plate. Crimps can be some of the best connections and hold up better than solder to vibration and thermal loads.

[@szsenyuk8887]

Solid copper, not plated.....

[@jonored]

@@szsenyuk8887The small ones I get are usually tin-plated as an anti-corrosion measure. Means they're silver rather than red unless scratched, but not much more than that.

[@EdwardTriesToScience]

Probably wouldn't even need a proper one but a small length of copper tubing and then coat with ceramic paint

[@jonored]

@@EdwardTriesToScience I've had much better luck with the purpose-made ones, but it can be done enough to work with small copper tubing. The copper tubing is almost certainly a much thinner wall, and that makes it hard to get a good crush-into-connection on it; from memory, the small sizes of crimp the wall is around the same thickness as the hole diameter. Probably easier to get the crimp than to get a tube with similar specs, unless you Really Need One Now and can drill out a solid rod for it, or can put up with a significantly less reliable connection.

[@whatevernamegoeshere3644]

@@EdwardTriesToScience I would suggest ferrules. They are literally under a cent per piece. a ferrule crimper is like 60 bucks but it's a good long term investment because from then on you can make solid connections for practically free

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Your 'source of copper' seems an unreasonably expensive alternative source, but I guess you do what you must. Plating the thermistor onto your hotplate leads is ingenious!

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would zinc mess this up if you used gilding grade copper 95/5

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Brilliant way of restoring your hotplate, by 'growing' a copper crystals on those leads, and avoiding solder...

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A more efficient solution to producing stronger, less spongy copper when depositing is to use assymmetrical AC. I made alkaline battery rechargers during the 80s with this technique. By using diodes to clamp the voltage over one phase, it's possible to limit the outgoing current that would otherwise pull copper ions off the deposition substrate whilst the unclamped phase deposits them. The resulting copper deposition is much stronger and compact.

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In an old text describing copper and silver refining they boiled the slime from a copper cell in sulfuric acid to dissolve both copper and silver, then poured it into cold water to precipitate the silver sulfate. The copper sulfate were only diluted and could go back to the copper cell as electrolyte. If my memory doesn't fail me it was done with concentrated sulfuric acid in cast iron pots, but lab glass should also work. :-) Thanks for posting again! I've learned so much from your videos and I'm looking forward to your coming ones.

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Very useful copper plating Current vs Voltage info. Thank you!

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Although I've moved over to mechanical engineering instead of chemistry like I intended in the past. I still find your videos fascinating ever since I found your channel back in high school about 10 years ago. Seeing this video just really brought me back to that time our teacher showed us copper sulfate pentahydrate and how it went from that vivid blue colour to white by just heating it up, then back to this beautiful blue again after adding water. Thank you for this video, thought I'd tell you I've been silently enjoying your videos over the years and look forward to your next uploads. Glad to see you are back.

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