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I agree that capping should provide better efficacy past the stomach.
If I have this straight, your colloidal silver is already stablized at 20ppm and so, capping induces no further change in the particle size.
When making higher ppm's, the capping is done during reduction, and so particle size is affected more?
Is that what Kephra is referring to?
Otherwise I'm still confused as to why capping an already stabilized particle would make the particle bigger.
NBD, I'm confused on a daily basis.
-Sancho
Sancho, its not that capping a stabilized particle makes it bigger. Its that insufficient capping allows it to grow bigger. At 20 ppm, no stabilizer is necessary. As the ppm increases then stabilizer is necessary.
Think about making a high ppm colloidal product. To do that you have to have the reducing agent in the water at the start so that the amount of ionic silver does not exceed 20 ppm because it would start to precipitate as silver oxide if it did.
Then, the nanoparticles start to build right away and all is well until the solution approaches 20 ppm metallic silver. Once that happens, the electrostatic repulsion starts to fail and the particles would start to weld together and grow to unwanted size. To prevent that, the stabilizer (capping) agent must also be in the water.
For most stabilizers, there has to be at least one molecule of stabilizer for each silver atom on the surface of the nanoparticles. As the electrolysis proceeds, and the stabilizer is used up, then new nanoparticles will be unstabilized, and grow out of control resulting in a mix of big particles and small stabilized particles. This produces the turbidity of the product.
There are two kinds of stabilizers, ionic and steric. Ionic stabilizers work by increasing the electrostatic repulsion. Steric stabilizers work by physically keeping the particles apart by means of their size. Ionic stabilizers are chemical compounds like sodium citrate or sodium dodecyl sulfate. Steric stabilizers are large molecules that do not ionize like starch or gelatin. Each one has its limit of stabilizing power and exceeding that limit produces larger than wanted particle sizes.