A RADIOCHEMICAL STUDY OF ELECTROPLATING. Technical Report No. 17

The electroplating of silver from a radioactive solution onto a metal cathode was investigated to determine the suitability of the radioactive tracer techique for the study of irreversible electrode phenomena. It was found that when appropriate precautions are taken to assure a fixed specific activity of the plating bath and to mount reproducibly a sample in a counting chamber the radioactivity method is satisfactory for estimating the amount of plated material, if a flat surface or if a curved surface which can be flattened reproducibly is used. The statistical fluctuations appearing in the method are somewhat too large however to permit satisfactory measurements for precise quantitative studies of polarization phenomena, where small differences between large numbers are involved, at least with the techiques employed in this study. The same limitations also apply to methods based on radioautographs made from the radioactive plated material. (auth)