Some ideas for concentrating plastic icu chip gold

Gold Refining Forum

Help Support Gold Refining Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

im1badpup1

Well-known member
Joined
Oct 25, 2017
Messages
90
Hi i dont have time to go into detail right now but id just like to put forward an idea i have about separating plastic from ic chips.
Its pure speculation and somewhat vague but if theres something suitable available youll be happy for it.

Whats the MP and does anyone know exactly the composition of the plastic coating the ic chips?


How about heat the chips in the high bp 'oil' and with a bit of luck your plastic floats up and your denser materials sink.

In a perfect scenario the plastics have separated and can be removed. They wont have pyrolised or incinerated and no toxic fumes given off.
Your left with a skeletised defleshed ic chip ready for another process.

I will try my best in the coming days to find a particular document relating to series of high boiling relatively inert chemically dense liquids and post it for scrutiny and possibility.. in the meantime someone might find it first and expand on the idea

I think im in error i was thinking of higher alkanes and paraffins or waxes even perhaps silicon oil but theyll react with the plastic acting as a solvent. They may well still separate from the chip but then youd have to distill to the mess afterwards to recover the solvent

Would it be feasable to crack a batch of plastic chip material with pyrolysis and use the alkanes distilled in subsequent batches to dissolve ic chips conveniently though?

Sorry if its a pointless post
 
'Plastic' ICs are really Epoxy ICs, not a thermoplastic

We know that the Epoxy does not melt easily because when we pyrolize ICs they retain their shape when subjected to higher temperatures than I expect your oil-bath would do.
 
What you described, is basically "wet ashing", which is forbidden on this site, due to its deadly dangers.

Instead look for pyrolysis follow by incineration. After these two steps, you may choose gravity separation, smelting or even acid leach.
 
He isn't describing wet ashing, what he is talking about is melting the plastic off, which wont work. When heated it will only turn into carbon and "ash" and keep the form, just like Kernels wrote. The "ash" we always talks about is the filler material, silicon dioxide powder, a fine sand that makes up about half of the volume of the plastic.

im1badpup1, time to learn the basics and less crazy ideas. :wink:

Göran
 
Before I saw Göran's post, I spent some time re-reading the original post, try to find any indication of "wet ashing" but, as Göran said, none exists. Wet ashing is the decomposing of organic materials using quite hot concentrated sulfuric acid. Very dangerous process, especially when on a scale larger than that of a small to medium sized beaker. Just one drop of 400+F sulfuric can cause a nasty burn. Also, the copious emission of white fumes of toxic SO3 gas can occur. One time, I was offered quite a bit to set up wet ashing for large volumes of gold-bearing ion-exchange resin. I turned the job down.
 
Back
Top