Ruthenium Anyone?

If you google this: Ruthenium prices, you get several articles talking about Ruthenium going sky high in cost to around $800 a troy ounce at the current market. The driving force is hard drive platters where Ruthenium is being sputtered on in place of or in addition to Platinum as I understand. Is anyone recovering it off the platters? Ruthenium is also used in the solder paste used to connect the surface mounted capacitors on circuit boards in computers. Is anyone recovering ruthenium from these?

Ruthenium is back down to $340-$440 about the same as osmium and iridium. It was $35 an ounce not to long ago. Considering it is one of the rarest of the pgm's it is worth recovering. I would be interested in hearing about any successes in recovering it.
Here is a link from today about ruthenium;
http://www.platinum.matthey.com/media_room/1182337207.html

Just a quick question here? Is the metal plating on automoblie headlite reflectors ruthenium or rhodium. I get them confused.

It is rhodium, and only certain ones. I don't
know which ones, but I would guess high end.
If they all where I think the junkyards would
be saving all of them if they were coated with
$6000 per ounce metal, no matter how thinly.
I would be curious as to what models have the
coating just to experiment with them.
Jim

From

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5660462-description.html

The envelope, at least in the portion having the reflective coating, preferably has an ellipsoidal shape, and the filament is located on or near the axis of the ellipsoidally-shaped envelope. The reflective coating is preferably formed on an outside surface of the envelope and may be selected from the group consisting of aluminum, silver, copper, chromium, nickel, gold, rhodium, palladium, platinum, and combinations thereof

From

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5660462.html

5. A lamp assembly as defined in claim 4 wherein said reflective coating is selected from the group consisting of aluminum, silver, copper, chromium, nickel, gold, rhodium, palladium, platinum, and combinations thereof.

and from a 155 page report that i could not find it in as fast as the google engine did but i put it here for you to look into:

http://www.bmbikes.co.uk/photos/press%20PDF/1999%20Press%20Release.pdf

(platinum and palladium) as well as reduction (rhodium) being applied to a ...... lens to eliminate any deficiencies, the headlight reflector used here ...

so it seems there may be applications where it is used, but the values may be near small enough to be a waste of time trying to get them out....

Hokes book talks about Pt and Pd being easy to recover but does not cover the process to gather Rh in any easy manner in fact says that it can be quite hard to do so.... what method is anyone using to recover Rh??

William

Thank you for all the documentation. Yeh it does look like a big waste of time. Especially of you do not know what mixture of alloys is used. They can evaporate aluminum onto plastics and give it a high polish.

In 1969, I was involved in a project to recover PGMs from an ore sample that was a candidate for a mining project.
It turned out that there was a high percentage of Ruthenium in the PGM mix.

This is where it gets fun. Ruthenium oxidizes explosively. We had a sample cooking in a fume hood using a Perchloric acid mixture to put it in solution. It detonated, and pretty well wrecked the fume hood. Lots of fun to clean up, especially dealing with the Perchloric acid.

Luckily, neither the chief chemist or I were standing next to it, but we were in the room and it was loud.

As a popular TV show likes to retort:

Do not try this at home.

On edit:

This is from OxfordPlatinum's post:

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=150

"The residue from rhodium sulfate leaching is fused with alkali nitrate salts to convert ruthenium to soluble sodium ruthenate. After filtration, the solution of sodium ruthenate is treated with chlorine gas to distill off the ruthenium as the volatile compound ruthenium tetroxide."

The Ruthenium Tetroxide is a white powder that precipitates out in the recieving flask.
This is what we were doing when the explosion occured.