Help me please ! - Should I put a permanent air bubbles in my stock pot ?

Hi,

As a baby refiner, I would like to know wether I should put a permanent air bubbles in my stock pot. If yes, what for ?
In a video on internet, a refiner seemed to use a permanent air bubbles in his stockpot. but I may have misunderstood something.
Thank you for your response,
Best,
U Ciocciu

I'm probably greener than you are, but I definitely think you should if your wastes are mostly HCl based... The effect would be two-fold:

1) mechanical agitation - it moves the solution around exposing it to fresh copper and knocking down the crust of PMs already cemented...
2) basically you'd make a form of AP in your stock pot - constantly oxidizing it will help you to keep it saturated with copper (II) chloride, thus quickly dissolving any copper metal and precipitating out any PMs in solutions you'll add to it.
With a setup like that you could probably add to your stock pot some low yield copper based gold plated material (copper pins), you don't want to mess with separately, the AP will eat it as long as there is free Cl available (and there probably will be some in your waste solutions)

Thank you so much for your opinion, nicks neims !

You've got a really precise one, and I appreciate very much.

Thank you again
U Ciocciu

Funnily enough Nik, some people put lower grade gold plated copper in their stock pots for that exact reason. 8) 8)

Kills two birds with one stone.

Jon

thanks guys, but can't really take any credit for it - I think I read it somewhere

But I would like your opinion Jon on the matter of putting common gold plated connector(IDE, PATA, SATA) pins in stock pot - are they pure copper (with little nickel)? If they contain tin (bronze) I'd imagine it would complicate things a lot?

niks neims said:

thanks guys, but can't really take any credit for it - I think I read it somewhere

But I would like your opinion Jon on the matter of putting common gold plated connector(IDE, PATA, SATA) pins in stock pot - are they pure copper (with little nickel)? If they contain tin (bronze) I'd imagine it would complicate things a lot?

Click to expand...

Frankly I don't have a stock pot as such in the classical sense Nik so I can't answer you but if you ask Nickvc nicely I'm sure he could since he was the one who told me about it :lol:

Jon

anachronism said:

niks neims said:

thanks guys, but can't really take any credit for it - I think I read it somewhere

But I would like your opinion Jon on the matter of putting common gold plated connector(IDE, PATA, SATA) pins in stock pot - are they pure copper (with little nickel)? If they contain tin (bronze) I'd imagine it would complicate things a lot?

Click to expand...

Frankly I don't have a stock pot as such in the classical sense Nik so I can't answer you but if you ask Nickvc nicely I'm sure he could since he was the one who told me about it :lol:

Jon

Click to expand...

Fair enough;

Nickvc, if you read about this, could you shed some light on it for us - what's with the standard PC pins, stock pot or not? Somewhere buried deep In my subconsciousness I seem to recall that I`ve read somewhere here that bronze pins in stock pot makes a mess....

niks neims said:

Somewhere buried deep In my subconsciousness I seem to recall that I`ve read somewhere here that bronze pins in stock pot makes a mess....

Click to expand...

I believe your subconscious may be correct. Given enough time and O₂ the tin in the pins' alloy will oxidize from stannous to stannic. Creating the dreaded tin goo.

It probably would just come down to personal preference. It's a cheap and efficient way to process low grade pins while cementing the stock pot at the same time. Only you are left fighting the tin at the end. I've been tossing the occasional handful of pins in my stock pot for a while now. Hopefully that fight with the goo won't be to terrible. 8)

As you are going to have to incinerate any recovered material from your stock pot I don’t think it’s a major problem unless you are putting large quantities of tin bearing pins through as once it’s incinerated you can remove the tin with hcl but as there seems to be a fair amount of plated copper and brass around in e scrap you could use it that if you are worried about tin.