Well, I'm no chemist and the question is certainly open to one.
But it seems to me that if you subject silver and silver oxides to the
heat of firing [which you don't] they will sinter onto the ceramic and
carbon [from the sawdust you use to make the ceramic porous?] and the
oxygen in the silver oxide should be driven off to make a well distributed
high surface area metallic silver substance as used in the NSA brand
bacteriostatic silver impregnated charcoal water filter that's been around
for a decade or so which both sterilizes the water [to prevent
comtamination of the filter according to NSA but may actually do a lot more
than that] and removes chlorine. [Wouldn't the water already be sterile
from the chlorine??? Humm]
Since it's difficult to make electro CS at any strength without also
making metallic particles and metallic particles of small size [large
surface area] kills microbes just as well as ions...perhaps that's what is
doing the job for you rather than the oxides.
Then too, silver oxides might not be as inert as people think. Silver
chloride is something like ten times less effective than pure silver but
1/10th is still significantly active at , say, 10 PPM while the pure stuff
is similarly active at 1 PPM even though it's not very 'soluable'.
{Metallic silver isn't soluable either}
A .22 can make someone just as dead as a cannon. I'd hate to try and run
through a room full of people firing BB guns at me.
Bottom line... What works works. If you figure out why..or don't, it
still works. Now, what if you figure out why it can't? [Wrong with all the
right reasons?]
What happens if you place an oxide blackened electrode in
chlorox? sodium hypochlorite [Gotta try that] If it changes at all,
something's happening.
OK, doing it. [electrode from last batch run is sorta dark gray...darker
than the other one but not black]
Humm. Many tiny bubbles form instantly and stick. Electrode is even
blacker than it was in mere seconds.
..not sure how relevant...
A few years back I ran across a backpackers water purification setup that
used chlorine to sterilize the water and hydrogen peroxide to neutralize
the chlorine.
ken
At 08:41 AM 5/24/2003 +0530, you wrote:
Ode,
I wonder if you can 'shed some light (pun)' on an issue that we
ceramists are facing, as to solubility of silver oxide in ceramic water
filter media. We saturate the ceramics with concentrated CS, and when
these filters dry out there's a reaction that's something like: Ag+ + e
+ O --> AgO. It's the silver oxide in the filter that disinfects the
water. (A phenomenon that only now, after about 3000 years is gaining
widespread credibility with scientists.) The question is at the heart
of a huge debate among those few ceramists who deal with permeable
filtration media, as to just what goes on if the water that's put
through the filter contains chlorine. Does the chlorine react with the
silver oxide? I'm no chemist by a long shot but I had always thought
that silver oxide would be too insoluble for this too happen.
Reid
Ode Coyote said
That's not light sensitivity.
When CS ions lose the water that solvates them, the ions oxidize into
silver oxide on exposure to the air. The normal color of silver oxide
is
black but as i pointed out in a previous post, there at least 3
varieties
of silver oxide. One may be reddish or deep yellow or dark orange. I
haven't seen a color notation on the differences.
Silver oxide is inert. Dried metallic silver is immobile. Both
essentially ineffective for different reasons.
Ode [ken[]
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