Hello I've recently attempted creating nickel acetate using a nickel electrode from a set of electrodes of different metals I've purchased on Amazon.
I've filled a small plastic container with a solution of common 3% hydrogen peroxide and distilled white vinegar and placed in it the strip of nickel
as the anode and a bundle of mechanical pencil leads as the cathode, and waited a few hours.
Now I have successfully made blue-green copper acetate this way with copper anodes and I know nickel acetate is also supposed to be a greenish color.
However after waiting a while, my container was instead filled with this brownish-tan sludge. Just what do you suppose happened? Maybe the "nickel"
strip was not really pure nickel at all but perhaps an alloy of some sort or even nickel-plated steel?LanthanumK - 10-10-2012 at 09:17
You probably got the clay pulverized out of the mechanical pencil leads (they have a mixture of clay and graphite) by the bubling. BTW, NaCl with
electrolysis should produce greenish nickel hydroxide at the anode quite easily. Aqueous chlorine is a powerful corroding agent. Even silver is not
immune. Iron would be strongly magnetic, rust in salt water, and produce a greenish sludge which slowly turns into a reddish-brown color, while nickel
is weakly magnetic, does not corrode in pure salt water or in vinegar/hydrogen peroxide solution, and has a golden tinge to it.Terminus_Est - 10-10-2012 at 18:43
You probably got the clay pulverized out of the mechanical pencil leads (they have a mixture of clay and graphite) by the bubling.
You sure it could be that? I went and looked at the leads(4 of them in the bundle by the way) and they looked pretty unscathed to me. And as of now,
the solution became such an almost opaque dark brown-red color that looks as if it was iron rather than nickel.
I'll try the electrodes in some saturated NaCl solution anyway.plante1999 - 11-10-2012 at 03:52
Your ''nickel'' is not nickeld, it is probably stainless steel or bare steel. Brown-red precipitate by electrodisolution of nickel indicate this, of
course it can be something else.
