# Seperation of Eliments



## rusty (Apr 10, 2013)

Just thought it was cool that after the sediment settled overnight I now have four distinctive bands of color at the bottom of the jar.

Each of the elements in the jar are insoluble in AR and have a specific gravity greater than copper.


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## solar_plasma (Apr 10, 2013)

Nice! What is it from?


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## rusty (Apr 10, 2013)

solar_plasma said:


> Nice! What is it from?



An assortment of black IC's purchased off of ebay, keeping track on the recovery to see if my purchase was profitable. The data will be useful towards future purchases.


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## rusty (Apr 10, 2013)

Another day of gentle heat, same jar.

After this settles a bit more time to filter.


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## rusty (Apr 10, 2013)

The good stuff were all after.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccq0KgSUZbM&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]


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## rusty (Apr 11, 2013)

After three days on a gentle heat, 2/3rds of the solids have been consumed in the AR. I'm left with the heavy gray powder with a very thin layer of brown which is easily panned off using water.

Here is where things get interesting, from the acid bleach leach the brown powder virtually remains untouched. 

Rare earth metals are soluble in nitric acid, hydrochloric acid and sulfuric.

Shocking news, a quick call to Sipi one of the major players refining e-waste, informed me that they only refine gold, silver, platinum group and copper, disposing of the waste which includes the rare earths.


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## rusty (Apr 15, 2013)

My question is probably beyond the scope of most forum members, certainly mine.

The ebay lot was mostly black chips, concentrates from the centrifuge pre leached nitric acid 50/50 water, my question has anyone experienced a white precipitate on the addition of hydrochloric acid that resembles silver chloride but does not curdle as silver chloride would.

Ok its been awhile since I last processed any silver, the white precipitate was put into a container, water with a few drops of sulfuric acid and some scrap iron to convert to metallic silver. After several days there was no change in color but the powder now clumped together firmly.

Enough powder to fill a small melting dish, fired up the torch. Thought there would be a bunch of smoke from any silver chloride, no smoke. 

The powder melted into a puddle with very little smoke on cooling I broke the crucible and there is no silver, the greenish top layer is flux, it's the bottom layer that is of interest --- what is it.

Reminds me of a slab of tigers eye I had when I was doing lapidary as a hobby with my kids.

Incidentally a lot of ore samples are cut into thin slabs and polished before going under the microscope.


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