iron(II) chloride as a Flocculant

iron chloride is used in waste water plants as a flocculant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(III)_chloride (please copy and paste as the link is not complete) after reading on this for awhile, it seems to me that this can be used to precipitate colloids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocculation im wondering if anyone has eve used it for the purpose of PM recovery? i dont think ive ever seen it mentioned as such. the way i see it as colloids can be a large cause of loss just because people dont know how to identify colloids or how to deal with them. having tin in your process will almost guaranty that you will have some form of colloid form during the process. can FeCl2 be incorporated into the overall process to ensure no colloids gets discarded?

i may be totally off the mark with this but it is just an observation and curiosity on my part.

Clickable link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(III)_chloride

Göran

Flocculants don't actually cause dissolved substances to precipitate out, they only cause (charged) nanoscale colloids to clump together into something big enough to overpower Brownian motion (and thereby float or sink).

That said, if you somehow end up with (for example) a cloudy purple "solution" of known-gold, it might conceivably help. It could also help earlier in the process to pull murky crap out of our "witch's brews" :lol: , but once you've reached the point of starting to dissolve the copper, it would undo that (and everything lower on the reactivity series) progress.