Efficiency of Plating and Anodic Stripping of Silver from Platinum Electrodes

Published work on the plating of small amounts of silver on platinum electrodes has indicated that the anodic coulombs required to oxidize the plated silver are substantially less than the cathodic coulombs used to plate the silver. After properly pretreating a platinum electrode, this discrepancy vanishes. It is possible to plate less than two monolayers of silver on a platinum electrode and quantitatively account for the cathodic coulombs in terms of double layer charging effects and anodic coulombs. At oxidized platinum electrodes, apparent loss of plated silver occurs.