# Incineration/Drum Tumbler/RAM yield optimization



## Acid_Bath76 (Sep 16, 2011)

Hello everyone. I've been working on a large batch of RAM over the last week. As the process moves along, I have been contemplating on whether I'm getting the most value from the material. Costs have been covered, and there's a small profit that makes the time and effort worth it. This is a part time job, and I really like what I'm doing, so part of the profit is the enjoyment. Processing RAM in AP has gotten me to thinking. I consider it a fairly novice process when compared to some of the others. Don't misunderstand me, that thick nasty yellow chlorine gas will kill you. I think you get my point. Anyhow, I digress. Back to the topic at hand. There is more Au on the RAM than just that found on the fingers. Some of the flatpacks, and other small components have PM values that have been covered on this forum many times as well. I'm just going to throw out a number. With 300lbs of gold foil RAM cards varying in age, is it cost effective to crush everything into shredded bits(reducing batch size, and increasing surface area), incinerating, and then recovering the PM's and copper? Or do you think it would be better to simply cut the fingers, process them, and sell the trimmed cards to a middle man? At $7.50/lb for trimmed RAM it seems somewhere someone is able to extract significant values from these trimmed cards. If the middle man is paying that amount, then the end user must be making a little more gravy on top of that. I'm trying to figure out at what weight this could become profitable? I say "could" instead of "will", because there is another long list of required equipment and knowledge necessary to bring this to fruition. So, I'm curious, at what weight would you start flirting with this idea of doing it all yourself? As batch sizes continue to grow, I want to learn how to make the most of it. Until that day comes, I'll keep reading and looking for solutions. 
Thanks again in advance!


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## jimdoc (Sep 16, 2011)

I was told before that one of the values in the memory chips is gadolinium. How do you plan on recovering that? I would rather sell them at the best price you can find, after keeping the fingers for easy gold.

Jim


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## Acid_Bath76 (Sep 16, 2011)

No clue!  I don't even know how to properly pronounce it! Time to do some more looking around and reading!


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## Palladium (Sep 16, 2011)

Here’s how I do mine and some things I have discovered. Matter of fact I’m running about 20 lbs of it now. I have done upwards of 50 lbs this way. Remember I try and do things from a commercial view. I take all my cards without removing anything and put them in a 5 gallon bucket, fingers and all. Add 1 gal of muratic acid and top off with water until about 2 in from the top. You don’t want to fill it top the top. Put the top on the bucket for safety. You don’t want to know what can happen when 5 gallons of hot hcl hits the ground. Drill a small hole in the middle of the lid so air can escape. Then sit that in a warming apparatus. I have a deep fryer like you use for cooking turkey with. I cut a piece of plywood bit enough to cover the top with a hole cut in the middle like a doughnut. The hole is big enough to sit a 5 gallon bucket thru but not big enough where the lip of the bucket will not catch and rest. This lets it hang in the water and be stable. Heat the water but don’t boil it for about 1/2 hour from start to finish. The water will retain heat for several hours after you take it off. If you over heat two things will happen. One is copper will start dissolving and releasing gold. You don’t want that yet. Another thing is the mask will start to come off. You don’t want that yet either. After it heats and finishes remove it from the heater and place it to the side for 24 hours to cool and do its job. If you have another bucket ready place it in the heater and so on.

After 24 hours you can remove the lid and take a glass stirring rod and poke the boards. If the chips just fall off then you are ready for the next step. Stir the contents around to free the loose chips from the board. I put a lid on that doesn’t have a hole in it and shake like hell. Let settle for a few minutes. Then take the lid off and pour your muratic thru a filter to strain the acid and catch any gold foils that may have come loose. You can’t use regular filtering techniques you have to step up to something else and here’s what I use. http://www.dudadiesel.com/search.php?query=%2Bfilter+%2Bbag&i=filterbags
I use the 5 micron bag.

After you filter the hcl you can use it again for the next batch. I find it works well for 2 batches. Lay the filter sock to the side it will have both some solder mask as well as gold foils trapped in it. Next step. Add some water to the bucket, put the lid on and shake like heck. Again filter through the sock and lay the sock to the side. I keep mine in water to keep it from drying. Don’t worry about getting all the trash out it will get caught in the next step. Take the boards out and place them in a clean 5 gallon bucket. All your smd’s, flatpacks, and chips will be in the bottom of the first 5 gallon bucket. I take these later after they dry and run them over a screen to separate the larger chips from the smd’s. I then take the smds and run them thru ap later for palladium recovery. I take the larger chips and save them. I have 2- 5 gallon buckets full of chips now. I don’t know what all is in the chips but when I get to that process I’ll learn then. Buy not dissolving the legs that hold the chip to the board and just dissolving the solder you are separating a lot of copper in this step that would otherwise eat up you ap in the next step.

Next I take the washed boards that have been stripped and put in a clean 5 gallon bucket and add to that about enough water to get within a couple of inches of the bucket top. Add 1 lb of sodium hydroxide to it and place lid with hole in it on the bucket securely. You can find sodium hydroxide cheap in large quantities or you can buy drain cleaner in powder form for about $ 2 lbs container. Place in heater and heat for 30 mins. Remove and let cool for 24 hours. Let me just point out that if you thought 5 gallons of heated hcl was bad that this stuff is nothing to play with. If it gets in your eyes you will be blind, Permanently ! Safety !! Safety !! Safety !!!

After it cools shake like heck and filter through a different filter sock from the first one. Rinse with water and shake like heck again then filter the water through the same sock. Place sock in clean water and sit aside for further processing. It will have solder mask pieces and some gold foils also. At this point the boards should be as shiny as the day they were made. You can use this solution twice. Then you can run them through ap to recover your gold foils with little to no trouble from base metal interference. Once the boards come out of ap they will be clean as a whistle with nothing left on them.

A couple of notes: I’ve found some good gold under the mask on ram boards. The fingers are just the tip of the iceberg sometimes. You would be surprised on the returns under the mask once you get the other objects off the board. Not all are gold, most are copper, but at least it gives you some ideas. The copper I actually have a source to get rid of it to. I have to have 500 lbs at a time but they will take the cemented copper and place it in there shipment to a secondary melting processor. They give me 85 % of #1 copper price.

When I finish my ap I take and strain it through a filter bag also to catch the gold foils.I then take all three bags from the process, seal then tight with a piece of silver wire, and place them in my home made extraction apparatus. This is nothing more than a piece of 3 in pvc pipe 12 in long with clean out plugs on both ends. On the bottom end I have a pvc ball shut off valve mounted in the center of the clean out plug. I place the bags inside and close up the end. I then turn it up side down with the valve facing up and open the valve. You can add your hcl through the valve opening with a funnel. I then add bleach through the hole and shut the valve quickly. Shake for a couple of minutes and then let sit for about 15 minutes. I then release the pressure slowly while the valve is facing up. Once pressure is released I flip it over and I have a mount to hold the pipe. Open the valve and drain the liquid through your filter of chose. Then add water, shake and drain through the filter adding to your gold solution and precipitate. Only thing that should be in the filter sock is trash from the mask and maybe some silver chloride. You can add ammonium to the socks and shake well to remove the silver and then wash the socks to reuse later. Of course like any process it all depends on the value of the material. I also use it from time to time on whole boards.

Maybe that will give you some ideas.


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## NoIdea (Sep 16, 2011)

Hi Acid - You seem to be having a conversation all by yourself. :lol: 

So I will contribute my two cents worth.

I would process the lot, pyrolysis, grind, and sieve. The metal fraction (Large bits) are melted to form an anode, the fines, I mean really fine, is ashed, boiled x2 in NaOH, boil rinse x2, boiled in H2SO4 x2, boil rinse x2, dried, and then ashed. 

The ashed product is then leached with HCl/Cl and then …..The rest is in the forum.

I am trying one other step (still in experimental stage), washing the fines in a detergent solution, before HCl/Cl leach, from what I have observed this process puts in suspension the mud/clay etc from the processed ceramics, the heavier metal fraction settles very quickly (<5min) making for quick and easy decanting. Over time, 24hrs, the mud settles out of the detergent solution, making the detergent reusable. I still need to test the mud fraction for values.

Note: The above experiment failed as the mud fraction contained values.  

The pre-treatment of the fines with NaOH and H2SO4 does a really good job of removing a major portion of the base metals as the HCl/Cl leach produces only the sought after yellow solution.

Cheers

Deano


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## Acid_Bath76 (Sep 17, 2011)

It sure seems that way sometimes! I'm glad to have heard a couple alternatives to the regular "two bucket Method". A bucket with holes in it, submerged in a larger bucket with AP and a bubbler works pretty well. It takes some agitation though. My problem was trying to implement this with a large batch of fingers. So..... this morning I went and picked up an enormous couldron and submerged the bucket in this. I heated the water up, and within the hour the large bucket containing the fingers and HCL was working like a charm. During the afternoon, everything was reduced. Dudadiesel has a pretty good filtering bag/net. I plan to pick a couple up for the next steps. Thanks for the ideas! It worked like a charm. I'll post some pics when I get this wrapped up.


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## seawolf (Sep 18, 2011)

I got curious so I did a little googling.
Recovery of gadolinium and gallium oxides - Patent # 4400360...
Gadolinium and gallium oxides are recovered and separated...
www.patentgenius.com/patent/4400360.html - Cached - Similar

Rare Earth Business
Of particular and wider interest, Dacha reported current USD spot prices per ... Dysprosium Oxide $969; Dysprosium Fe Santoku $960; Gadolinium Oxide $185...
rareearthdigest.com/ree-news/news-business.html - Cached - Similar

Other than playing with gadolinium from the memory chips as a learning experience I don't think there is enough value to make it worth while.
Mark


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## glondor (Sep 18, 2011)

Palladium, that is an excellent tutorial. I will study your method and ask questions later. Seems like a nice method for boards of all types. Thanks for outlining it for us.


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## butcher (Sep 18, 2011)

my thought would be after I went to the trouble to recover them where to sell them, is there an market and could you sell them in small quantity? or would it be more profitable for me to sell the source material to a refiner taking some loss and let him sell them to his source.


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## Acid_Bath76 (Sep 18, 2011)

It seems with anything larger than a trimmed RAM fingers, it would almost seem better to incinerate first as NoIdea (Harold always talks about incineration too) suggested. Unless, of course, you know how to extract all the metals present. I don't. Not only that, but that would involve a lot of waste acid as well. I think this is working excellent for fingers. For anything larger, I'll probably end up incinerating first. That's going to involve a little more cash, but in the long run it's going to make things a little easier.


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## kjavanb123 (May 29, 2013)

How about cyanide leach on fingers, ICs processed using wet ash method or using hcl to take care of lead and tin, incinerate, follow by nitric to remove the silver copper, incinerate, hcl/cl for gold?


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## ericrm (May 29, 2013)

kjavanb123 said:


> How about cyanide leach on fingers, ICs processed using wet ash method or using hcl to take care of lead and tin, incinerate, follow by nitric to remove the silver copper, incinerate, hcl/cl for gold?



wet ashing isnt for a good option ,each time i used it i have endup with a boil over of hot concentrated sulfuric acid ... be carefull with that idea...


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## Captobvious (Jun 1, 2013)

Palladium said:


> Then sit that in a warming apparatus. I have a deep fryer like you use for cooking turkey with. I cut a piece of plywood bit enough to cover the top with a hole cut in the middle like a doughnut. The hole is big enough to sit a 5 gallon bucket thru but not big enough where the lip of the bucket will not catch and rest. This lets it hang in the water and be stable. Heat the water but don’t boil it for about 1/2 hour from start to finish. The water will retain heat for several hours after you take it off. If you over heat two things will happen. One is copper will start dissolving and releasing gold. You don’t want that yet. Another thing is the mask will start to come off. You don’t want that yet either. After it heats and finishes remove it from the heater and place it to the side for 24 hours to cool and do its job. If you have another bucket ready place it in the heater and so on.



Quick question for you, I've read your post several times now and can't figure something out. How do you heat your solutions in a plastic bucket? Seems like most heat sources would melt the plastic and create a huge mess. Can you elaborate please?


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## goldsilverpro (Jun 1, 2013)

Captobvious said:


> Palladium said:
> 
> 
> > Then sit that in a warming apparatus. I have a deep fryer like you use for cooking turkey with. I cut a piece of plywood bit enough to cover the top with a hole cut in the middle like a doughnut. The hole is big enough to sit a 5 gallon bucket thru but not big enough where the lip of the bucket will not catch and rest. This lets it hang in the water and be stable. Heat the water but don’t boil it for about 1/2 hour from start to finish. The water will retain heat for several hours after you take it off. If you over heat two things will happen. One is copper will start dissolving and releasing gold. You don’t want that yet. Another thing is the mask will start to come off. You don’t want that yet either. After it heats and finishes remove it from the heater and place it to the side for 24 hours to cool and do its job. If you have another bucket ready place it in the heater and so on.
> ...


A hot water bath is one way. You can heat the bath with fish tank heaters or recirculate the water through a hot water heater using a small pump. You can also use an electrical heating tape or strap wrapped around the bucket. The buckets will start to soften if you get them too hot - I would guess about 170-180F.


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## philddreamer (Jun 1, 2013)

I bought one of these several months ago; worth every penny!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/350560971799?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1438.l2649

Phil


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## Captobvious (Jun 1, 2013)

philddreamer said:


> I bought one of these several months ago; worth every penny!
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/350560971799?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1438.l2649
> 
> Phil



That... looks.... AWESOME! Definitely going to be getting one of these!

Thanks!


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## rewalston (Jun 9, 2021)

Sorry to bring up an old topic but I have some waste questions about the process. Once you have soaked the boards hcl (you stated it can be used twice) what part of the waste stream would you place this solution of different metals into? There is going to be tin, possibly lead, potentially some silver and possibly gold which the solder would have dissolved when the boards were originally produced. So I'm not exactly certain where it would go.



Palladium said:


> Here’s how I do mine and some things I have discovered.
> 
> After you filter the hcl you can use it again for the next batch. I find it works well for 2 batches. .......


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## DJPGold (Aug 1, 2021)

As far as I’m aware it would go in a waste treatment bucket once it’s not longer effective. Copper in the bucket would drop out any PMs. Though im not sure how to tell when the acid is used up aside from ICs not falling off etc.


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