Non-Chemical IC cons for resabed01

This thread dedicated to forum members IC chips that are being sent to me to mill into powder then run through the centrifuge.

It's here that we'll post the process live from both ends, I as I do my part then resabed01 as he his part.

resabed01 please post your weight and tracking number here, once I receive the package I'll re-weigh, if there is any discrepancy from the unopened package weight I will return the package as received. So please record your weights, I'll post mine here along with pictures.

Just wanted to say thanks again rusty for your generous offer to crush and run my chips through your centrifuge. I've been following your centrifuge thread with much interest because I have a growing pile of IC chips here and would like to learn a effcient way to process them.
I've incinerated about 2kg of chips over the winter as a small trial batch. My plan was to wash and concentrate the ash to see what gold and other PMs I could get out of it this summer. But winter here won't let up anytime soon. Rusty offered to run this ash through the centrifuge as well so I will include that with the shipment.

The chips I'm sending rusty will be black plastic ICs only. I wanted a good representation of this without other contaminations. The chips will range in size from plastic 486 CPUs and quads down to the teeny 8 legged surface mount. The bulk of them will be DIP chips of all sizes. About 30% of them will be memory chips, the old chunky style.

Chips I'm not sending are ones that have a lot of base metal like a heat sink. Also I'll be keeping the North/South bridge chips for processing myself :mrgreen: . I also removed all the ceramic DIP chips because they are not black plastic and they weigh considerably more skewing the numbers.

The next day or two I will have the chips ready to ship. I'll post some pictures and weights.

resabed01 said:

Just wanted to say thanks again rusty for your generous offer to crush and run my chips through your centrifuge. I've been following your centrifuge thread with much interest because I have a growing pile of IC chips here and would like to learn a effcient way to process them.
I've incinerated about 2kg of chips over the winter as a small trial batch. My plan was to wash and concentrate the ash to see what gold and other PMs I could get out of it this summer. But winter here won't let up anytime soon. Rusty offered to run this ash through the centrifuge as well so I will include that with the shipment.

The chips I'm sending rusty will be black plastic ICs only. I wanted a good representation of this without other contaminations. The chips will range in size from plastic 486 CPUs and quads down to the teeny 8 legged surface mount. The bulk of them will be DIP chips of all sizes. About 30% of them will be memory chips, the old chunky style.

Chips I'm not sending are ones that have a lot of base metal like a heat sink. Also I'll be keeping the North/South bridge chips for processing myself :mrgreen: . I also removed all the ceramic DIP chips because they are not black plastic and they weigh considerably more skewing the numbers.

The next day or two I will have the chips ready to ship. I'll post some pictures and weights.

Click to expand...

Your welcome. I'll post when the package arrives.

Here's some pictures of what I sent Rusty.

Black IC chips, all assorted 8.88Kg



When I pulled out the chips and weighed them I only had about 8kg??? I forgot I incinerated about 2Kg so I had to make up the difference. I quickly harvested another 2.00Kg of memory chips form some ram I have. And I have blisters on my hands to prove it!




So that totals 10.88Kg of Black IC chips.

Rusty also offered to run the ash I have from incinerating 2.14Kg of black ICs. The weight of the ash is 936g. It's been crushed and screened, not perfect because there are still legs mixed in and it could probably use more milling.




Tracking number: 7218809008178898

www.canadapost.ca

resabed01 your package arrived, weighed at post office 12.550 kg

Chips being processed dry, not incinerated loaded into the ball mill 4:00 PM, will pull them out in the morning around 10:00 am, 18 hours in the mill will be sure to abrade the gold from legs and make nice powder ready for the centrifuge.

There's been plenty of discussion and debate over ball mills, my mill according to some is incorrectly made. I consider it a batch mill and it does whats needed of it.

http://youtu.be/dlsLCo3sRsA

I like the simplicity of that ball mill. It looks like something i would build. Simple, functional, and you can beat on it with a 3lb sledge hammer if you want.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaDd34paaQU[/youtube]

Palladium said:

I like the simplicity of that ball mill. It looks like something i would build. Simple, functional, and you can beat on it with a 3lb sledge hammer if you want.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlsLCo3sRsA&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

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I do beat on it with a 3 lb sledge, after a run to knock down any gold clinging to the drum. Then use a small paint brush as a whisk to sweep it out once empty.

Think the largest balls in the mill are 3 or 4 lbs each.

:mrgreen: crush 'em up good!

resabed01 said:

:mrgreen: crush 'em up good!

Click to expand...

resabed01 do you know the vintage of those chips, they were a tough grind after 18 hours dry milling they were only 50% ground up. Finished up wet milling, they're done.

Yeah, I don't recognize any of them now...lol

They are mostly 80s and 90s vintage..... the epoxy has had lots of time to harden I imagine

resabed01 if you look at your cons second picture below you'll notice the heavier fractions settling out near the bottom. Once my curiosity was satisfied removed the vessel from the source of vibration.

From the camera flask how the precious metals reflect - bottom picture.

I have the cons sitting on the hot water heater drying out.

Rusty, that looks awesome! I bet the camera doesn't do it justice.

resabed01 said:

Rusty, that looks awesome! I bet the camera doesn't do it justice.

Click to expand...

Your cons certainly do look good and we recovered much more than I had anticipated.

The dry powder on top is the sweeps from inside the ball mill, I still have to add fresh water to the pails and brush them down before adding the waste water through the centrifuge. Just some cleanup stuff left to do.

Been doing lots of thinking about my plan of attack with the cons rusty is producing when I get them back. But first I should try and understand what will be in the mix. The way I see it, no matter how well the chips were milled, alloys won't separate into their base elements. The metals on plated parts can get abraded and separated. There are plated parts, mainly the legs that are covered with gold and tin and possibly palladium. There will be tin/lead solder. There could be gold or silver alloys for brazing the chip die. Stainless steel, copper and alloys that contain iron, nickel and probably a few others I'm overlooking.
If rusty did everything well with the centrifuge, the concentrates should contain copper and everything heavier. I expect the centrifuge will sort these elements and alloys in the same manner in the bowl. But nothing is perfect and the lines will be blurred. I expect to see plenty of solder in the mix, especially if there are bits that have alloyed with gold. Below is a sorted list of possible elements I could expect in chips according to specific gravity. I know I won't see all of those elements.

2.330 Silicon
2.800 Aluminum max.
5.320 Germanium
5.910 Gallium
7.130 Iron cast max.
7.310 Indium
7.310 Tin
7.700 Steel, 440C stainless
7.800 Steel, carbon
7.900 Gadolinium
8.420 63 Sn & 37 Pb
8.650 Cadmium
8.710 Cobalt
8.890 Copper
8.900 Nickel
9.790 Bismuth
10.50 Silver
11.35 Lead
12.02 Palladium
12.41 Rhodium
12.45 Ruthenium
13.534 Mercury
16.69 Tantalum
19.22 Tungsten
19.32 Gold, pure
21.45 Platinum
22.42 Iridium max.
22.57 Osmium

I was thinking of starting off with a wash of boiling water to remove any organics/dirt. Not sure if I want to incinerate as the first step as I think the cons will mostly be metal paste. I could do a caustic soda wash like Hoke advises but I really think that will do little to the crushed plastic IC casings that would be present. Then, move onto washes of hot hydrochloric acid to start the removal of tin and aluminum that may be present.
After that, incinerate or roast the cons before moving onto a hot nitric acid wash to start removing the base metals.
My concern is with the HCL washes, won't they leach the palladium from the mix? If so, I'll have to treat those to recover the Pd.
Thoughts on anything i should do different?

How well will the sodium hydroxide work on metallic lead and tin rather than oxidized lead and tin? Anybody know?
I think it's a good idea to get tin and lead out first. I would think you should avoid hcl for getting rid of copper and base metals. I would be worried it will cause problems with silver recovery because of AgCl. You could use HCl if you wanted, but I would think that after that you might want to smelt your cons to change the silver chloride back to silver. You might want to flux and melt anyway, it just seems cleaner and more predictable given how many things we don't know about working with this material or what really is in there. You'll end up with your silver and palladium in a metallic piece that could be dissolved with nitric to get your gold If there's a lot of stuff that isn't dissolving from the sequential nitric and ar digestions, I think it's the only way to be reasonably confident in the thoroughness of the recovery.

resabed01 said:

I expect the centrifuge will sort these elements and alloys in the same manner in the bowl. But nothing is perfect and the lines will be blurred.

Click to expand...

I don't want to be pessimistic but I'm still skeptic to how well this centrifuge will separate various material. What I see is happening is that the heaviest material will sediment against the wall of the centrifuge but as soon as it is packed in it will not move. When panning or other gravimetric methods for separating out heavier from lighter materials is used you always have it suspended in water during the process.
The commercial centrifugal concentrators that Rusty linked to in the other thread uses water channels inside the wall of the centrifuge to create a fluidized bed where lighter materials is lifted by the water and heavier materials sinks to the bottom (or the wall in case of a centrifuge).

If the ball milled concentrate is made into a slurry with quite a lot of water then I guess that the flow of water could take the lighter ash away while the heavier stuff get stuck to the wall of the centrifuge but there is no way it can separate the heavier sediments along the wall into different fractions without something to liquify the sediments.

Göran

Maybe I am incorrect in thinking the centrifuge will nicely sort all the metals according to specific gravity. I see your point in that the heavies will plant themselves in the bowl and not want to be displaced by those slightly heavier. Water is a good lubricant in this regard but maybe there is something better? Glycol or the addition of some soaps? I know that the centrifuge won't work perfectly for separating gold from the rest of the metals. There are better mechanisms better suited for this task. Maybe it could happen if the operator ran the concentrates through numerous times, classifying and separating but that's time consuming. But I do believe the centrifuge is a very useful tool for concentrating the metal sludge. The plastic IC casing being the biggest headache when trying to recover PMs from ICs, removing this first will greatly help in the later steps of removing the base metals and ultimately, recovering the PMs. Reducing acid use and speeding up the process is the goal.... hopefully :mrgreen:

g_axelsson said:

resabed01 said:

I expect the centrifuge will sort these elements and alloys in the same manner in the bowl. But nothing is perfect and the lines will be blurred.

Click to expand...

I don't want to be pessimistic but I'm still skeptic to how well this centrifuge will separate various material. What I see is happening is that the heaviest material will sediment against the wall of the centrifuge but as soon as it is packed in it will not move. When panning or other gravimetric methods for separating out heavier from lighter materials is used you always have it suspended in water during the process.
The commercial centrifugal concentrators that Rusty linked to in the other thread uses water channels inside the wall of the centrifuge to create a fluidized bed where lighter materials is lifted by the water and heavier materials sinks to the bottom (or the wall in case of a centrifuge).

If the ball milled concentrate is made into a slurry with quite a lot of water then I guess that the flow of water could take the lighter ash away while the heavier stuff get stuck to the wall of the centrifuge but there is no way it can separate the heavier sediments along the wall into different fractions without something to liquify the sediments.

Göran

Click to expand...

Water is the key, and lots of it. What the centrifuge excels at is collecting fractions within a certain specif of gravity range, if gold is present it will squeeze out the lighter material water at 9.9 lbs to the gallon being flung over the top of the bowel taking excess garbage along.

Göran you would have to run one of these fantastic machines to get a better understanding of how it works. In the meantime wave at the competition as it passes you by.

Yes I linked to a centrifuge with a fluidized water jacket of which both Falcon and Knelson hold various patents on, how much water pressure would you need in the jacket to be effective.

Centrifuges are not new technology, they've been around since the late 1800's, they are very good at what they do but require a lot of water to work properly and this fact makes their use unfavorable in remote locations.

Purchasing that 10 liter reactor was not on a whim, the concentrates I'm getting from the centrifuge are the perfect candidate for that new reactor - basically slimes.

skippy said:

How well will the sodium hydroxide work on metallic lead and tin rather than oxidized lead and tin? Anybody know?
I think it's a good idea to get tin and lead out first. I would think you should avoid hcl for getting rid of copper and base metals. I would be worried it will cause problems with silver recovery because of AgCl. .

Click to expand...

You have sodium hydroxide (NaOH)...so...you will not be encounter AgCl...if you use distiled water
My worry would be to use a tall plastic jar(in case of Aluminium presence will foam...alot).
I never tested antimony with NaOH(can be present in the pins of IC)....and the alloy of...let"s say 70/30 Sn/Pb solder alloys with NaOH.....alloys have different chemical proprieties then the original metal.

Well, my concentrates arrived back home Monday. There's about 1100g from the chips I sent, roughly 10% or a bit less.
I'm itchin to start processing the cons but I have a few other things I'd like to clear off and finish first. I'm also waiting on a set of beakers I ordered. Plus we're still waiting for nicer weather here. It's snowing again tonight :x .

I was thinking of mixing it well and starting a 100g test batch. Then I can see what percentages of base and precious metals I have. Playing around with a magnet there seems to be a fair bit of iron in there and I'm guessing lead too. We'll see when I get out the acids. I'm still mulling a process over in my head. Been reading Hokes book again to get some direction from her and refresh my memory. the first time I read her book it didn't make much sense. Now that I'm reading it again 3 or 4 years later it's all clicking now.

Thank you very much for running the chips through your centrifuge, Rusty.