Palladium Complete Sequel

One ounce troy Palladium refining sequel........

Sequel Continued......

Sequel Continued.......

Have you tried melting the sponge into metal?

Dan

I would've taken the extra time to digest in ammonia and go through the diammine given the color of the supernatant indicating nickel.

It's been my experience that the purer these salts are, the more voluminous and fluffy they end up.

Also, your sponge has a weird look relative to our output and the industry standard for it.

We go for filterability--here's an example of the sponge we make. Prior to calcination.

Dan,

As the sponge is melted,I would post.

Lou,

Green color is due to chlorine source(NaOCl) which was overused.Even during reduction more NaOH was used then normal Stoichiometry requires due to presence of Chlorine in Palladate.

As regards the look of my sponge,this was oven dried without fully neutralizing the reduction supernatant (was in a hurry),so it dried in an ammoniacal enviroment.The end use of this sponge is destined for a Jeweler.

Lou I second your observation regarding the voluminous and fluffy appearance.

Great post!

The Pd sponge somehow looks like small expensive coal bricks

As Lou will agee. getting .999 pure Pd is not a simple operation. As I have a little experience, getting it from sponge & powder into a castable metal is not so easy either. I have been called by friends, Dan the Devil as I had to make a pact with the devil to be able to get it to cast. When you can go get Maple Leafs at $40. over spot, makes you appreciate the difficulty that your jeweler customer is going to have. Cast it without a Vacuum or Argon is going to cause lots of problems with post cracking of the metal. Difficult path that you are going down. Best of luck & success.

Dan

You can O2/H2 melt the material and it will look shiny but it cannot be made into a casting. Have learned this the hard way.

It can only be vacuum melted and doing that from the sponge is a difficult proposition, as most induction melters' work coil frequencies are too low to melt anything less than bulk metal. You can do it if your customer starts with a heel made from the pure metal or alloy thereof.

Below is the melted Palladium button sequel as promised,weight 27.1 grams melt loss almost 2.75%..........

This extra series might help as a visual guidance for a reasonably complete Palladium Refining Processes.. The raw weights 25.5 grams which is being refined....

Without going through the underlying process already visualized, we are starting direct from (NH4)2PdCl6......

Note Picture 10:

(FOR COMPARISON PURPOSE ONLY)

This Tetraammine Palladium II chloride is contaminated with other base metal which also form ammine complexes with ammonia i.e Nickel,Cobalt,Copper and Chromium etc which usually color blue or green.To make sure the final yellow Diamminedichloro Palladium II salt is free of base metals,it should be again digested into ammonia to match with the standard transparent color with yellow tint.

Yellow DiamminedichloroPalladium II salt was reduced by Formic acid and 6.25 M NaOH.Resulting beautiful settling Palladium Grains are shown.......

Hope everybody would enjoy and learn from this series.


Rao

Good stuff!

Absolutely enjoyed it
Absolutely do not understand,but thanks for sharing.
If you are interested in toll refining some of the brick red,pm me
john

Appreciated all the comments.

John, If you want your brick red to be toll refined then pm me in detail of what you have etc.Only then I may suggest my opinion.

Rao

John,

If you have Pd to the brick red stage, you've done most of the hard work. It's all downhill from there.

Steve

John,

Or otherwise would second Steve's stance.

Steve,Rao.
Last time Ithought it was all down hill,the ride in the fast moving soap box racer was fun
until i realized the only thing at the bottom of the hill to stop me was
a bulldozer blade.
john