• Please join our new sister site dedicated to discussion of gold, silver, platinum, copper and palladium bar, coin, jewelry collecting/investing/storing/selling/buying. It would be greatly appreciated if you joined and help add a few new topics for new people to engage in.

    Bullion.Forum

AP on my way

Gold Refining Forum

Help Support Gold Refining Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
It's really cold outside at night, temperatures can go down to -8°C. Because I didn't want my glass to crack because of the ice, I warmed it up a bit. I didn't even think about the water evaporating.
 
I have been researching persulfates as a fast gold finger releasing solution, to keep halides as far away from the gold as possible. Then I searched persulfates here and found this thread. I'll share some of what I've found:

1. There are apparently many ways to "activate" persulfates in solution (which are basically salts of piranha solution). What is meant by activation is the generation of sulfate radicals, which have an oxidation potential around that of Florine. Some common ways to activate persulfates are heat (50c-70c), UV light, base metal ions (Fe and Cu in particular), silver ions and alkalinity to name a few.
2. Attached are papers from 2016 and 2017 where ammonium persulfate was was explored as a way to recover gold from ewaste by removing the substrate. They were able to get 100% gold release in 5 minutes with 30psi pressure (pressure cooker) or 40 minutes with heat (70c I think) at normal pressure. Spent Ammonium Persulfate is Ammonium Sulfate.
3. Ammonium Persulfate (aka APS) can be regenerated or generated by electrolyzing a saturated ammonium sulfate solution with 30% by weight sulfuric acid. In theory you might could have a gold finger removing solution that was constantly electrolyzed regenerating the APS, you would have base metal sulfates in solution.
4. Potassium Peroxymonosulfate (PMS) is the potassium salt and sold in the pool section as non-chlorine shock. I bought some to experiment with, though I think I will likely go the APS route from electrolyzing ammonium sulfate (cheap fertilizer).
5. Most persulfate research can be found around the buzz term PS-AOP or PerSulfate based Advanced Oxidation Processes, which mainly refer to the use of persulfates to oxidize organic pollutants to CO2 from sewage to underground. The uses are not limited to organic pollutants.

There is much more than I can write here now, but long story short, I think it is definitely a promising alternative to CuCl and other halide based methods to release gold and possibly even dissolve base metals from inquarted gold.
 

Attachments

  • Gold_Recovery_from_Electronic_Waste_by_Pressure_Ox.pdf
    753.9 KB
  • gold recovery from electronic waste using selective ammonium persulfate oxidation Alzate_A_et_...pdf
    2.2 MB
I have been researching persulfates as a fast gold finger releasing solution, to keep halides as far away from the gold as possible. Then I searched persulfates here and found this thread. I'll share some of what I've found:

1. There are apparently many ways to "activate" persulfates in solution (which are basically salts of piranha solution). What is meant by activation is the generation of sulfate radicals, which have an oxidation potential around that of Florine. Some common ways to activate persulfates are heat (50c-70c), UV light, base metal ions (Fe and Cu in particular), silver ions and alkalinity to name a few.
2. Attached are papers from 2016 and 2017 where ammonium persulfate was was explored as a way to recover gold from ewaste by removing the substrate. They were able to get 100% gold release in 5 minutes with 30psi pressure (pressure cooker) or 40 minutes with heat (70c I think) at normal pressure. Spent Ammonium Persulfate is Ammonium Sulfate.
3. Ammonium Persulfate (aka APS) can be regenerated or generated by electrolyzing a saturated ammonium sulfate solution with 30% by weight sulfuric acid. In theory you might could have a gold finger removing solution that was constantly electrolyzed regenerating the APS, you would have base metal sulfates in solution.
4. Potassium Peroxymonosulfate (PMS) is the potassium salt and sold in the pool section as non-chlorine shock. I bought some to experiment with, though I think I will likely go the APS route from electrolyzing ammonium sulfate (cheap fertilizer).
5. Most persulfate research can be found around the buzz term PS-AOP or PerSulfate based Advanced Oxidation Processes, which mainly refer to the use of persulfates to oxidize organic pollutants to CO2 from sewage to underground. The uses are not limited to organic pollutants.

There is much more than I can write here now, but long story short, I think it is definitely a promising alternative to CuCl and other halide based methods to release gold and possibly even dissolve base metals from inquarted gold.
The electrolisys method is not suitable for stripping foils from pcb's as the persulfate only exists close to the anode if i understood it correctly.

regarding inquarted gold: Not including white gold, and I still have to run some tests with 'high' silver content gold, but the sulfuric cell 'dissolves' or actually parts karat gold.

No need to inquart and find an alternative for nitric to eat 3 times as much as the gold you have to refine.

You can just part the alloy in the cell and, in comparison to inquarting, dissolve the tiny amount of silver present in the slimes with way less nitric or simply in your AR digestion or leave it in the slimes as you dissolve the gold out with HCl & bleech, completely leaving nitric out of the process.
 
Yesterday I made an AP with a little hydrogen peroxide and bubbled it. Do you think I could add sodium persulfate? I'm asking about the hydrogen peroxide.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top