Building a good working capacity NI Fe Battery.

shortbus= said:

How do they do "electroless nickle" plating?

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You would need a hell of a reducing agent and likely an alloy, i suspect the prep would be a mare and maybe after treatment. I cant think of a reducing agent off the top of my head, none of the really common ones i know of would do it.

So likely something slightly exotic, may phosphites but thats guessing. Hypochlorites etc wouldnt work. Nickel is a real odd ball even for a transition metal. I will look it up in the books later and see what i come with.

Too much trouble for me, i would buy the chloride and electro plate, but i prefer electroplating. Ferric Chloride is pretty fast with catalyst (by nickel standards). Oh and some heat

When still working electroless nickle was pretty much the go to for repairing worn mold parts. Just thought it might work to make up nickle plates for a battery.

shortbus= said:

When still working electroless nickle was pretty much the go to for repairing worn mold parts. Just thought it might work to make up nickle plates for a battery.

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That would make alot of sense, but amateur setting and first coat plating....doable but i like what i know best, i also like the fine control you can get with electric. A business with decent suppliers have more options, but the kind of reducing agents needed are hard to get small scale and expensive. I am aware of a similar process for gold, but i have no idea how they do it without electric. I did look into the chemistry at one point, but only stuff i found was pretty nasty to work with.

I have seen a process at a show where they paint the chemical on and use shortwave UV, but i have absolutely no idea how they do it chemically. And wisely they havnt put a patent in.....

I really need to post up the pics and write up of the Nickel stuff, its a real odd ball element. Although not that healthy to work within salt form, safer than Cobalt however. I did some meristem experiments with Cobalt salts, shocking what it does to DNA

Well i mixed a little 32% Ammonia solution into the Nickel(II) Chloride, I got heat and black gloop! I strongly suspect its actually very dark purple which would make it Hexaamine Nickel(II) Chloride.
I chose ammonia because if there was any iron or ferric chloride i would of expected dirty brown mud! Strange however that it seem all the ferric chloride has reacted......

I wouldnt expect that but there was a little Nickel left over so its possible. Despite the papers etc describing Ferric (III) Chloride acidified with HCl being fast at dissolving Nickel, its not what i call fast!! It took several days, at the moment the Nickel II chloride is heavily watered down, but still a good deep green colour. I will evap alot of the water off.

Next step is to try a larger batch.
edit
So looked again and it does show signs of some iron. But i dont think the amount is going to matter for a plating bath

What i did find was a couple of old patents and some old papers, not directly related but it does make me think we can twist the chemistry of this and make a hybrid battery. I want to try a couple of things first before i go into detail, but if this works then we may have a decent battery!

Ok some pics just for uncle JIM

So i mention Ferric chloride and HCl with a amine to dissolve Nickel into Nickel chloride, well i have done a slightly different route. Keep in mind this is so people with old coins that are nickl or nickel metal flakes can make nickel chloride for plating.

First off i used high strength commercial Ferric chloride also known as Iron (III) Chloride, i notice on the bottle it lists a small amount of HCl is in it already (hydrochloric acid/muriatic acid), I added a couple of ml of 36% HCl (max realistic strength) to the ferric chloride and dropped the PH to around 2, The HCl in the commercial stuff helps prevent the Iron (III) chloride turning into Iron (II) chloride (basically rust).

The amount used was only a gram or so of Nickel flakes and probably 60ml Ferric Chloride, as you can see after a few days some nickel did remain .


The solution turned very dark and i feared i had failed, i dont have the pic!! A setting mic up made the pic unusable but it looked similar to this one.

The main difference being there was no orange like staining but rhere was a little Iron (II) staining.

I decided i would water some of it down with the intention of seeing if the orange ferric chloride had change in colur much, to my surprise a small amount of solution (~30ml) with 80-90ml water gave me this colour....


Now that certainly has a reasonable amount of Nickel chloride in!

i was going to use some ammonia to complex with the Nickel and attempt to separate it from any remaining Iron in the solution, point to note that particular solution has now stood over a week, very little if any Iron (III) or (II) chloride is showing.

However on adding 2-3ml of 32% Ammonia solution (again about the max strength of ammonia in solution), it did complex but produced the pic i have used above with the orange stains. So it does indeed still contain alot of Iron Choride/s.

However we want this as a plating bath, so next question is, can the solution in the last pic be used to electro plate Nickel?

I havnt done that yet, i will post the results, be aware you will get Chlorine on attempting to electro plate with this, i will show you my normal way to deal with this and because not every one has lab gear, i will show a 'ghetto' way of dealing with the chlorine safely, it will need some sodium thiosulphate solution but thats cheap and easy to get, it used to be used in film processing as a stop bath. It turns Chlorine into harmless elemental sulphur.

Please if you want to play at home wait for the next pics before doing so, unless your ok with and used to handling toxic gasses

EDIT
On reading back i noticed everything had (II) and no (III), i am positive i did use some (III), so i am more and more convinced my nutty auto spell thing is playing up, i type looking at my fingers , my proof reading is like my dancing

I should have pointed out, there will be electronic based content coming up in this thread. But unlike the Q&A type threads, these are more like interactive articles. So i felt it was important to give the back story and information in sequence. For those purely into electronics, maybe best to come back a few pages on. I am currently trying out the plating and building a controller to do this automatically and safely, i will of course publish pics and schematics.

As promised i did look for and i think i found an easier way to post pics, so i hope to make my posts more techni colour

large_ghostman said:

It turns Chlorine into harmless elemental sulphur.

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it undergoes an exchange reaction with the chlorine and you end up with sodium chloride and sodium sulphate. that's assuming there aren't other compounds in solution. there are no nuclear reactions taking place, so no, you can't change chlorine into sulphur. it is kind of difficult to make a nucleus give up a single proton.

if you do electroplating with a chloride, be careful to keep the hydrogen and chlorine gases from the electrodes separate, a molar mixture of hydrogen and chlorine can be ignited by ambient light.

unclejed613 said:

it undergoes an exchange reaction with the chlorine and you end up with sodium chloride and sodium sulphate. that's assuming there aren't other compounds in solution. there are no nuclear reactions taking place, so no, you can't change chlorine into sulphur. it is kind of difficult to make a nucleus give up a single proton.

if you do electroplating with a chloride, be careful to keep the hydrogen and chlorine gases from the electrodes separate, a molar mixture of hydrogen and chlorine can be ignited by ambient light.

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Yes you are correct, i am not on best form currently, thank you for the correction. I shall go back and add corrections shortly.

I am aware of the danger of Hydrogen and Chlorine, hence my warning not to proceed yet, but again i thank you for being more specific.

I am mostly self educated and know Very little so far about electricity or chemistry, so please forgive my ignorance. Earlier in this thread someone mentioned mesh being ideal because of the surface area to mass. Would it be possible to weave it out of wire for small scale home experiments? Thank you : )

E.Kelley said:

I am mostly self educated and know Very little so far about electricity or chemistry, so please forgive my ignorance. Earlier in this thread someone mentioned mesh being ideal because of the surface area to mass. Would it be possible to weave it out of wire for small scale home experiments? Thank you : )

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You have nickel wire readily available? It seems like you would have to go out of your way to get that when you could just go out of your way to get nickel mesh.

Oh, the joy of nickel metal allergies and sensitization from nickel powders, mesh, sponge and frit. Rashes, blisters, metallic taste no matter what you eat or drink. Joy joy.

Bad enough when irritated by stainless steel alloys, but pure nickel is 100x worse.

gophert said:

Oh, the joy of nickel metal allergies and sensitization from nickel powders, mesh, sponge and frit. Rashes, blisters, metallic taste no matter what you eat or drink. Joy joy.

Bad enough when irritated by stainless steel alloys, but pure nickel is 100x worse.

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Does that mean you can't use stainless steel tweezers either? =( Or utencils?

dknguyen said:

Does that mean you can't use stainless steel tweezers either? =( Or utencils?

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It means people with nickel allergies usually have contact dermatitis from some stainless steel alloys (rashes when they have contact to sensitive skin areas (neck, wrists/forearms, face, ... )). Some people have trouble with watches, watch bands, watch buckles, or jewelry clasps. It usually takes some time for sweat (corrosive salty water) to dissolve nickel ions out of the alloy.

The more surface area the nickel source has, the faster the sweat could draw enough nickel into the skin to make an irritating rash. Fine dust and friable nickel sponge can be inhaled and cause irritation on the lungs to the degree the longs no longer work and the patient suffocates.

I've only met one person who avoided stainless steel utensils, medical instruments, ... but it is common enough that dental brackets (orthodontics) are available in cobalt-chrome, titanium and other nickel-free alloys. Most implants are nickel-free alloys because many people develop nickel allergies over time (and corrosion accelerates over time) so nickel is avoided.

If your looking for a long term battery solution, Nickel Iron Battery is the best option for you.

Adrainsmith said:

If your looking for a long term battery solution, Nickel Iron Battery is the best option for you.

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Do you have the numbers requested in the first post to add anything more than another opinion to the conversation?