Microscale Environmental Chemistry. Part 9

An interesting scheme for the recovery of some metals from waste solutions is cementation, whereby spontaneous electrochemical activity takes place in the absence of an external power supply between a metal substrate, N and the ions of a more noble metal, M (i.e., a metal with a higher standard potential). We present here an experiment completely performed within a spectrophotometer cell, where Cu(II) is cemented onto a Zn pellet and the absorbance decrease is monitored at 810 nm. A first-order cementation kinetic plot is presented.