Measurement of halides in photographic emulsions

Abstract

Conventional Ag/AgX electrodes, responsive to halide X, cannot be used to monitor the addition of a second halide Y since such additions result in a slow chemical conversion of the macroscopic halide coating AgX to AgY. This is a serious problem in the manufacture of photographic emulsions that frequently contain more than one silver halide. The thesis describes a new electrochemical measurement technique with the ability to make appropriate determinations in solutions of mixed halides. In the new technique (termed "clean/coat/measure"), silver electrodes were prepared "in situ" by applying square wave pulses to the electrode. First the previous halide layer was removed, then the electrode was coated in situ with a new layer of silver halide and this was used to measure the open circuit potential before the cycle was repeated. In this way the halide coating reflected the composition of the measurement solution. Existing commercial instrumentation was inappropriate for the proposed measurement sequence. Thus, a range of instrument hardware and software was designed and built by the author and used to study the influences of a multitude of parameters on the measurement performance. 1. A stable and accurate measurement system was designed and fabricated allowing the potentials of eight electrodes to be measured simultaneously in grounded solutions. Data was collected and stored on a PC using custom written software. Calibration curves for conventional silver/silver chloride, bromide and iodide electrodes were obtained over a range of concentrations and temperatures. Silver/silver halides electrodes with small surface areas (

Date of Award	Feb 2003
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bedfordshire