LED lights yield

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Pictures of the LEDs,? Wasn't sure exactly what lights to save. So I've been saving every little light I come across. I've just started to collect. And was wondering the yield on them. Also did you say mg? Like milligrams? Like less then a whole gram? I'm not sure that's enough for it to be with it.
 
Golddigger76 said:
That is great information, I have a lot of them to but didn't know if it would be worth the effort.
What process did you use to get rid of the plastic ?
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I used wet ashing. I placed half of the LEDs in a litre beaker and poured 500ml of concrete sulfuric acid then placed the beaker on a hot plate and set it to 40% power.

There was a cover on the beaker but not much fumes or sulfur gas came out.

It took almost 12 hours on this setting to dissolve the plastic.

Then they are rinsed washed and nitric treatment followed by AR the bond wires.
 
Rreyes097 said:
Pictures of the LEDs,? Wasn't sure exactly what lights to save. So I've been saving every little light I come across. I've just started to collect. And was wondering the yield on them. Also did you say mg? Like milligrams? Like less then a whole gram? I'm not sure that's enough for it to be with it.
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I try to post a picture. They are red and clear.

They are not worth unless you have 100s of thousands.

Yield was 0.028g of gold per 514.5g of them.
 
Very interesting, my assumption was that you used a ball mill to get rid of the plastic.
I have never tried wet ashing with sulfuric on anything and most likely will not but it is amazing how much I learn here every day after years of reading.
I do refining of karat gold, silver, PGM'S from catalytic converters, pounds of silver mostly high voltage electrical contacts and a fair amount of high end electronic boards.
Thank you for the contribution of information on the led lights, I have a lot of them that I keep adding to my bucket and was thinking that when I fill up a 5 gallon bucket I might try to process them the same method as IC chips.
 
Golddigger76 said:
Very interesting, my assumption was that you used a ball mill to get rid of the plastic.
I have never tried wet ashing with sulfuric on anything and most likely will not but it is amazing how much I learn here every day after years of reading.
I do refining of karat gold, silver, PGM'S from catalytic converters, pounds of silver mostly high voltage electrical contacts and a fair amount of high end electronic boards.
Thank you for the contribution of information on the led lights, I have a lot of them that I keep adding to my bucket and was thinking that when I fill up a 5 gallon bucket I might try to process them the same method as IC chips.
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Most of us stays away from wet ashing.
Concentrated Sulfuric acid is bad but 300C hot Sulfuric is another dimension of bad.
 
Exactly my thoughts !!!
Platinum group metals are dangerous enough for me !!!
Sulfuric acid at room temperature is not something to mess with without having proper personal protective equipment, it will burn you to the bone so anyone who wants or needs to be using it please give it the proper respect !!!!
 
What of other metals? The little 'cups' inside the LED and the tips of the posts often have PGMs, rhenium, or even rhodium.

But those are the OLD generations of LEDs. The newer ones are certainly much lower in precious metal content. The gold filaments are VISIBLY thinner when I compare my oldest ones to my newest ones.

Most of mine come from older stuff, 1970's to early 90's.
 
$1.80 worth (@ $2005/ozT) of Au yield from $4 worth of acid and 12 hours or your life, not counting waste treatment and disposal. Hardly worth the risk to your health. Hopefully they were free and already sorted/recovered by someone else.
I'd love to see a video of the cleanup process you used to handle the waste and lab ware cleanup.

Steve
 
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Alondro said:
What of other metals? The little 'cups' inside the LED and the tips of the posts often have PGMs, rhenium, or even rhodium.

But those are the OLD generations of LEDs. The newer ones are certainly much lower in precious metal content. The gold filaments are VISIBLY thinner when I compare my oldest ones to my newest ones.

Most of mine come from older stuff, 1970's to early 90's.
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Beware, the housing of the LEDs will cause a macro effect like a loupe.
 
kjavanb123 said:
Hi everyone

I processed 514g of LED lights with a single gold bonding wire inside them.

There were 3045 piece of them, I only recovered 28mg of gold from them.

Best regards
KJ
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I have to think it’s the type of LEDs you were processing, and/or you had some losses somewhere? For comparison below I’ll link a test video that 999 Dusan made about 4 years ago. He’s been refining a long time end I trust he knows what he’s doing. My short recap is:

He used a mix of different sizes and colors of old-style DIP package LED’s.
He started with only 179 grams (then removed any external leads still left with nitric acid, so even less weight?).
After incinerating and crushing, acid processing, etc, he recovered 1.2 grams of silver which you didn’t even mention in your post.
He also got a bead of gold which was less than .1 gram so his scale wouldn’t weigh it. Visually though it looks to me like it was probably more than your result of 28mg? But he started with only 1/3 the amount of material that you did?

For comparison he has another video he did a year later where he processed only the little square white surface-mount type LEDs. While he got a good amount of silver, they contained no gold at all.

 
macfixer01 said:
I have to think it’s the type of LEDs you were processing, and/or you had some losses somewhere? For comparison below I’ll link a test video that 999 Dusan made about 4 years ago. He’s been refining a long time end I trust he knows what he’s doing. My short recap is:

He used a mix of different sizes and colors of old-style DIP package LED’s.
He started with only 179 grams (then removed any external leads still left with nitric acid, so even less weight?).
After incinerating and crushing, acid processing, etc, he recovered 1.2 grams of silver which you didn’t even mention in your post.
He also got a bead of gold which was less than .1 gram so his scale wouldn’t weigh it. Visually though it looks to me like it was probably more than your result of 28mg? But he started with only 1/3 the amount of material that you did?

For comparison he has another video he did a year later where he processed only the little square white surface-mount type LEDs. While he got a good amount of silver, they contained no gold at all.

Click to expand...

I think I've seen a couple of his videos, and if my memory serves me right it is the typical south Asian style vidoeo.
Like Trinity and so on, I expect inflated yields and removal of all issues that arose during production.
I might be wrong though, first impressions can be tricky that way.
 
Yggdrasil said:
I think I've seen a couple of his videos, and if my memory serves me right it is the typical south Asian style vidoeo.
Like Trinity and so on, I expect inflated yields and removal of all issues that arose during production.
I might be wrong though, first impressions can be tricky that way.
Click to expand...

What a perfect way to say “I’ve never watched any of his videos but I already have a bad opinion” without actually saying it! I believe he’s from Serbia actually, and he does go through step-by-step and tells you about problems he ran into. He gets a lot of the former Soviet union scrap material also which tends to be more rich in metals like palladium and platinum.
 
macfixer01 said:
What a perfect way to say “I’ve never watched any of his videos but I already have a bad opinion” without actually saying it! I believe he’s from Serbia actually, and he does go through step-by-step and tells you about problems he ran into. He gets a lot of the former Soviet union scrap material also which tends to be more rich in metals like palladium and platinum.
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Ok, my bad, I have him mixed up with someone else.
I was not sure, which is evident in my post.
Anyway, many of the videos out there should be watched with caution.
 

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