[NewCandle] Silver dendrites

[Keith Nagel]

Hi All,

Here's a photo of an experiment I did around the time of my work with
silver.
The cathode shown here is carbon, the anode a silver disc (not shown) below,
the electrolyte is a solution of silver nitrate. Applied current was in the
neighborhood of a hundred milliamps.

http://www.kpnconsulting.com/newcandle/download/SilverDendrite.jpg

Silver is interesting in that it really wants to grow in the dendritic form,
it requires a special chemistry to get a solid dense plate at reasonable
current densities.

The point of this study was to better understand dendritic growth of silver
under controlled current density. In the aluminum displacement reaction,
the current density is uncontrolled but in general is _very_ high.

K.