Is this Palladium?

lazersteve said:

Amazing how long ago this was, about six months after I joined the forum. Back when I was cutting my teeth on Pd and Pt.

Turns out precipitate was a Pd salt. There was no gold in the solution.

If you are interested in Pd processes on monolithic's check out this post I made six years after the post you are replying to:

Pd from Layered capacitors

It's important to look for the most updated information on a subject when you are researching any process. All of us learn new techniques along the way and many of these updates get posted to the forum.

If searching the forum for a particular subject matter, be sure to sort the results by date so you are aware of the 'latest and greatest' information.

Thanks for bringing up the memories; everything was so exciting back then, a lot less like work than it is today and more like an adventure!

Steve

Click to expand...

so the precipate was palladium as i under stand ?!

that mean palladium powder would be white or whit gray and not necessary to be black or dark gray ?!

so please have a look is that could be palladium powder?

The powder I asked about was a salt and not metallic Pd powder/sponge. High purity Pd sponge is typically a fine black powder.

Your picture does not look like Pd on it's face since I do not see any blues or purples that are characteristic of homemade calcined Pd sponges. The blues and purples (sometimes blue green) resemble a peacock's feathers and are caused by oxides of Pd that form when the metal cools. If you cooled the metallic powder in the photo under a hydrogen blanket, then maybe it contains Pd. There are all sorts of gray powders that are formed during the refining process. Testing is the sure way to know what you have.

A quick test for the powder to determine if it contains any Pd is to dissolve a small sample (less than a pinch) in a few drops of HCl and 35% hydrogen peroxide in the well of a spot plate. Then place a drop of known good stannous chloride in the well of the spot plate with the unknown powder dissolved by HCl-Cl. If your the test sample goes from orange to drab colored green over the course of 5 minutes or less, then it is positive for Pd.

Here are the various results for stannous with the common PMs.

Stannous Tests

Steve

Peacocked Pd sponge.


FYI steve, most MLCCs have gold.