Electrolysis Calculator

One amp for one hour plates 1.19 g of copper — electrolysis is bookkeeping in electrons and nothing else.

Clear
Mass deposited1.18549 gfrom 3,600 coulombs
Moles of electrons0.037311 mol
Moles of product0.018656 mol2 electrons per formula unit
Charge passed3,600 C
Molar mass63.546 g/mol
Time to deposit one gram50.612 minat this current
One mole of electrons is 96,485 coulombs — a quantity fixed exactly by definition since the 2019 SI revision, because it is the elementary charge times Avogadro's number and both of those are now exact.

The formula

mass = I t M / (n F) ; F = 96485 C per mole of electrons

Charge is the currency

Faraday's insight was that electrolysis is bookkeeping in electrons. Current times time is charge, charge divided by the Faraday constant is moles of electrons, and the stoichiometry of the half-reaction converts those into moles of product. Nothing else enters.

Why the charge on the ion matters so much

Depositing a mole of copper from Cu²⁺ takes two moles of electrons; a mole of aluminium from Al³⁺ takes three. Aluminium is also light, so the mass per coulomb is small twice over. That is the reason aluminium smelting is one of the most electricity-hungry industrial processes there is, and why smelters are built next to hydroelectric dams.

Models, and where they stop

Slater's rules, the Kapustinskii equation and Pauling's ionic-character expression are all empirical fits, not derivations. They were built to reproduce measured numbers with arithmetic simple enough to do by hand, and they succeed at that within perhaps five or ten per cent. Where a page here quotes one, it says which — a figure from a fitted rule and a figure from a Born-Haber cycle are not the same kind of thing, even when they agree.