From Hydrogen to Tellurium - SILVER

Silver

Number 47 on the periodic table is silver, a well known metal which most of you will be familiar with. It has a characteristic "silver" colour. This metal is quite rare and therefore valuable. It is used in jewellery as it is malleable. The fact that it is very stable in air also increases it's suitability for use in jewellery and other decorative and useful items. Because it doesn't react with air it keeps it's nice shiny silvery appearance.


The chemical symbol for  silver  is Ag. This symbol comes from the Latin name for silver Argentum.

Silver is found as an ore so it can be mined in the same way as we mined the chocolate chips from cookies when we were investigating copper earlier in the year.

Silver has no known biological role and isn't found in the human body.

Silver doesn't support the growth of bacteria and is therefore often used for chalices where many people are going to drink from the same cup.


As well as being used in jewellery and silverware,  silver  is also used in photography, mirror production, for coins and dentistry. A compound of  silver , silver iodide is used to get rain clouds to rain.

Silver forms compounds with the halides, hydrogen, fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine. It also forms compounds with covalent elements such as oxygen, sulphur,
Selenium and tellurium.


Experiment of the week
To see if bread soda solution or washing soda make a better silver cleaner.

You will need:
2 Aluminium foil trays
Washing soda
Bread soda
Hot water
2 pieces of silver equally tarnished
A spoon
A timer
Adult supervision

What to do:
Put apiece of dirty or tarnished silver into each aluminium foil tray. Foil containers used by take away restaurants for rice are ideal.
Put a spoon of washing soda into one tray and a spoon of bread soda into the other one.
Pour equal amounts of hot water into each container.
Start the timer.
After 2 minutes remove both pieces of silver and compare. Which cleaning solution resulted in the cleanest silver?
Report your findings below.

Additional experiment - Compare your home made cleaning solution to a commercially available one.