Experimenting with Electroplating: Part 1

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image from Wikipedia

What is Electroplating?

"Electroplating, also known as electrochemical deposition or electrodeposition, is a process for producing a metal coating on a solid substrate through the reduction of cations of that metal by means of a direct electric current. The part to be coated acts as the cathode (negative electrode) of an electrolytic cell; the electrolyte is a solution of a salt of the metal to be coated; and the anode (positive electrode) is usually either a block of that metal, or of some inert conductive material. The current is provided by an external power supply." - wikipedia

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Materials 

I will be using a stainless steel baking tray to act as the Cathode for this experiment. for the Anode I used the end of a large coil of copper tubing that I purchased from the University of Minnesota's research center. To delivery the power required to perform electroplating I used a simple controllable power supply and attached it to the Anode  and Cathode with alligator clips.

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shown is the tray the blue tray hole is the one being deposited on, there is also a visual control of the water below it.

Experiment

the Experiment seemed to start out well with the water bubbling and the water slowly turning more and more blue as the copper entered it over time. It was amazing to see the chemical reaction take place in front of me. Over time (after 40 minutes) however the water started to slowly turn black after that i decided to stop the experiment, remove the water and observe the results 

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Results 

Unfortunately i was not able to get the level of copper deposition i did get the copper leaving the Anode but it didn't correctly adhere to the cathode of the tin tray. After a lot of research i found out that i needed to use copper sulfate in the water to create a proper electrolyte solution. i will do further research on what can be improve and publish a part 2 of this project with the new materials soon.

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