TrickyDicky
Member
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2016
- Messages
- 19
Deano,All products coming out of China are a mix of ferro/ferri cyanides with various amounts of other metal solvents, chelates and oxidisers.
They will all dissolve gold along with other metals, they all work by having uv light from sunlight split the ferro/ferri cyanides into cyanide and ferric/ferro salts.
They will not dissolve more gold than straight ferro/ferri cyanide will but you will have the problem of lots of other metals in solution along with high levels of oxidisers, usually peroxides.
If you are working with small quantities of material then you can zinc out the gold for recovery.
Larger scale processing using carbon will give you major problems in two areas.
All the junk metals in solution will load on the carbon giving you low gold loadings on the carbon.
When you go to strip the carbon the high levels of junk metals will not allow the gold to be stripped in any meaningful amounts.
This means that your only realistic way to recover the gold from the carbon is to ash the carbon.
Why people would rather use a mix of chemicals containing one which is actually useful rather than just using the useful one is something I cannot understand, I put it down to marketing to people who do not have the knowledge to sort out the facts.
Always keep in mind that the Chinese sales people are only interested in selling their product so by making it sound as if it is the all dancing all singing answer to their needs, they prey on the uninformed at inflated prices.
Depending on the regulatory conditions where you are you can usually transport, store and use potassium ferrocyanide or potassium ferricyanide without restrictions.
Always keep in mind that uv light is essential to split the cyanide away from the complexes, this means nothing more than making up a solution of the potassium salt and exposing it to bright sunlight at pH 11.
You will also get an orange colour in the solution, this is the ferric part of the potassium complexes forming ferric hydroxide.
The formation of the ferric hydroxides is rapid if you use the potassium ferricyanide complexes, it is slower if you use the potassium ferrocyanide complexes as it takes time for the ferro salt to be converted to the ferro salt by the dissolved oxygen in the water.
The ferric hydroxide does not affect the leaching of the gold.
Deano
Can the gold from the pregnant potassium/iron salts solution be absorbed onto resin instead of carbon?