# Alloy and Dust contains Copper / Zinc and Silver



## arsenic123 (Jul 5, 2014)

Hey guys recently I got my hands on a metal and a dust which contains 15-22% silver with copper and zinc mixed int it. I know if we directly dissolve it in nitric acid and precipitate with sodium sulphide for silver. Will that be the best way to go about it? Also what if I want to recover all the metals including zinc? 
Thank you.


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## Pantherlikher (Jul 5, 2014)

I wonder how an AP process would work.
Would get copper.
Would it touch zinc?

Along these lines, maybe you could separate with least acid. Or at least cheaper.

B.S.


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## g_axelsson (Jul 5, 2014)

Zinc would definitely dissolve in HCl.

I would probably treat it with nitric to avoid making silver chloride. Going after the values first.

If you use too little nitric to dissolve all the zinc - copper in the first run then silver would cement back onto zinc and copper and in the end you would have zinc and copper dissolved and silver still as a solid. Pour off that solution and add more diluted nitric. When you start getting silver in the solution most of the copper and zinc is gone. Put some copper in until all silver is cemented out. Now you can dissolve the solids which are mostly silver.

It takes a bit of finger tip feeling and to not over dose the nitric, but it could be done.

Copper can be electrowon, cemented on iron or smelted. Zinc can be electrowon or smelted. Probably not in an economical way on a small scale. Treat it as waste.

Göran


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## goldsilverpro (Jul 5, 2014)

Dissolve everything in dilute nitric and cement out the silver with copper bars.


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## 4metals (Jul 5, 2014)

If the mixture is silver copper and zinc then you can get pretty clean metal by dissolving in dilute nitric first

Drop the silver as metal with copper 

Drop the copper as metal with zinc

Drop the zinc with caustic soda filter it dry it and heat it to decompose the hydroxide


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## arsenic123 (Jul 6, 2014)

Thank you so much guys for the input. The easy way would be like GSP I guess. I can recover silver first and then maybe I can move to zinc and copper. Although I am mostly interested in silver but just had a thought. Thank you wonderful people for the great inputs. 
God bless this forum and it's members including me... :lol:


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