Average percentage of iridium in iron ore...

[Rhpos]

My iridium source averages 3 to 8% iridium in the ore I'm mining. 90% of the ores iron, the rest is gold silver and copper all below 1%. My question is this, is there anyone out there mining iridium coming up with similar percentages? And is 3 to 8% a sensible percentage to try to process and refine?

Hey there, did it indicate the presence of any titanium ? I've got a rock that analyzes 3% Ir too, but it is also 15% Titanium and about 66% Fe and a little silica, mg. Its either a stony iron meteorite (sm. amt. of olivine crystals present), or a relic from the Sudbury structure event. I found it amongst a field of glacial till in northern Ohio. A good book for Ir chem. is Refining and Recovery of PM's by Ammen. Ya need to pulverize that thing and give it the usual treatment. A good test is to precipitate out , I think it was a complex anion of Ir having a plurality of nitrous groups as ligands.

There was a nobel prize winning professor out at UC, who came up with a theory about the dispersion of Ir. We normally don't find it concentrated much above 0.5% or so, typically, .... IF I recall correctly

 

[Lou]

A good book for Ir chemistry is by Cotton and Wilkinson.

 

[Yggdrasil]

A good book for Ir chemistry is by Cotton and Wilkinson.

Is that the “Advanced inorganic chemistry”?

 

[Lou]

yes

 

[Yggdrasil]

yes

 

[levs]

.3-.6% iridium is the best I've been able to assay my meteorite heap...

There's a method of extracting iridium from iron

https://patents.google.com/patent/CN101985696A/en
The invention relates to a method for extracting iridium from iridium containing materials, in particular to a method for extracting iridium from rhodium and iridium containing solutions, iridium containing secondary resources or rhodium and iridium containing residues. The method is characterized by comprising the following extracting processes: (1) dissolving iridium containing materials with hydrochloric acid; (2) adding nitric acid and NH4Cl for reacting to obtain iridium and platinum mixed ammonium salt; (3) adding hydrazine hydrate to reduce platinum and separate out black spongy platinum powder and rhodium and iron impurity deposits; (4) adding H2O2 for destroying hydrazine hydrate, and adding (NH4)2S for purifying; (5) adding nitric acid and NH4Cl for oxidizing and depositing to obtain pure (NH4)2IrCl6, thereby obtaining the refined (NH4)2IrCl6 crystal; and (6) calcining and reducing by hydrogen gas. The method of the invention has the advantages of simple process flows, convenient operation, reasonable combination of processes and stable product quality. Mineral raw materials can be directly used for separating Fe, Pt, Pd, Rh and Ir, thereby effectively reducing the processes and furthest improving the recovery rate of metals.