I was looking into refining some nonferrous gold filled jewelry and am looking for ways to get around the use of large amounts of nitric acid. I was researching the feasibility of building an electrolytic cell using anodes cast from gold filled jewelry, around 3% gold content, and I came across an old research paper about brass refining. It is my understanding that the base metal for most nonferrous gold filled jewelry is brass. In the paper it outlined an experiment of running brass anodes through an electrolysis cell of a copper sulfate solution that deposits copper at the cathode, pulls the zinc into solution and leaves less reactive metals, gold and lead, as anode slimes where I could recover the gold. I haven't seen anyone else try this before and was wondering if there are any potential issues with this process. Are there other base metals in gold filled jewelry that would interfere with the process? or are there any other variables that I'm not accounting for?
here is the link to the paper I found
https://digitalcommons.mtech.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1086&context=bach_theses
here is the link to the paper I found
https://digitalcommons.mtech.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1086&context=bach_theses