Don't know if this topic will ever grow from the bar and grill phase

[Martijn]

Guys I saw that article and read it and had the same thoughts. It's just a novel reducing agent that happens to be easily removed as a sponge but you still need AR and you still need to melt the resulting sponge and further refine it. Like yall said it's really nothing new. Not to mention you have to process the whey as well.

We discussed this one not long ago.
It's not a reducing agent, It's a new light weight aerogel sponge that, like Activated carbon, can trap gold salts. a sponge. selectively soaking up much more gold salts than other metals salts.
You still need to reduce the captured salts to elemental form.
The gel can be burned off, and leaves way less material behind compared to Activated Carbon.
They are looking into ways to reuse the gel instead of burning it off.

 

[Paul Allee]

Is the idea like pre process the scrap-> metallic fraction directly to AR-> harvest the sponge-> incinerate-> rehydrate with hcl and then drop the gold with a standard reducing agent? I guess would that actually save steps?
Maybe yeah you could get through a little cheaper than leeching everything out with nitric, denoxing and then hitting the rest with AR. I'm new so I don't know. Does activated charcoal work similarly to this?

 

[Yggdrasil]

Is the idea like pre process the scrap-> metallic fraction directly to AR-> harvest the sponge-> incinerate-> rehydrate with hcl and then drop the gold with a standard reducing agent? I guess would that actually save steps?
Maybe yeah you could get through a little cheaper than leeching everything out with nitric, denoxing and then hitting the rest with AR. I'm new so I don't know. Does activated charcoal work similarly to this?

You still have to leach the Gold with an appropriate method first and the refine after incineration.
So no it do not save much, it seems it may be used a Activated Carbon for acidic solutions.

 

[Alondro]

I used a Mystic Pizza to adsorb gold...