Experiment Needed: Would someone with unrefined Au and a metal analyzer discover results?

[79Aurum]

All,
Refining Au flakes, nuggets and dust.

Would a Cone Mold created by rotating a stick in a container of Portland Cement and a direct pour of the molten Au, and borax from the furnace into the mold produce a Gold button beneath the slag?
What Au purity at this stage?
And could this button then be further refined in another round of direct pour, or by cupelling using flux?

 

[Yggdrasil]

All,
Refining Au flakes, nuggets and dust.

Would a Cone Mold created by rotating a stick in a container of Portland Cement and a direct pour of the molten Au, and borax from the furnace into the mold produce a Gold button beneath the slag?
What Au purity at this stage?
And could this button then be further refined in another round of direct pour, or by flux cupelling?

Do you have a bottomless cache of money and time, you may invent these things and see if they work.
If not, I'd stick to the proven methods because, well they are proven and work.
But first you need to know what is in the Gold you are going to process.
Under the assumption it is mainly Gold and Silver, you need to know how much of each and you can go directly to AR or need to inquart it.
If it is indeed 80% it will most likely be worth going straight to AR, if and only if you can verify that it do not contain toxic substances like As, Cd or Hg.
In the case they do you will have an issue on your hands, since it is not recommended to dissolve it nor smelt it without proper cleaning.

And lastly, to my knowledge there is no such thing as "flux cupelling".
Cupelling is heating the button in a cupel at around 1000C in the presence of Oxygen, sometimes it is scorified in the same kind of dish first.
Common to all these techniques is that you need to know what is in the mix to find the best suited process.

Search the forum for assaying and cupelling.
There are heaps of information available.
Even references for free books to read.

 

[goldshark]

There is no sense in doing what you want to do. By doing what you propose, you will get a lump of Gold/Silver, with a lot of cement adhered to your chunk of metal. It will require a bath in HCl to dissolve what carbonates are in the cement. You are only doing a sand cast, in effect. After you remove the cement, you will then have to remelt with a Borax flux, to collect all the stuff that didn't get dissolved in the acid bath. So now you are back to square 1, but now with a big chunk of metal, which doesn't dissolve as readily as what you had originally. After removing all the flux by chipping, reheat and pour into a water bath to create shot. This can then be chemically refined to whatever purity you want. After you chemically refine it, you can make a mold in any shape you want. C channel with end caps welded on the end, will make a very presentable bar of bullion. If I didn't have a steel cone mold, a steel C channel mold would be my next choice for pouring. You can also use angle Iron, with square or rectangular welded ends to hold it, so sides are on a 45 degree angle. Lots of bush fixes out there.
If you were to pour directly into a shaped Portland cone mold, the only increase in purity, would be by the removal of what bit of contamination was mixed with the original concentrate. No improvement in fineness of Au. Now you have to deal with the bonded cement problem. No sense in trying to reinvent the wheel. Round works best for overall performance. I suppose square tires may have an advantage when climbing stairs, but that is a whole other ball game.

 

[79Aurum]

Oh Well, so much for thinking outside the box, er... cone mold. Thx