Non-Chemical Flatpack, IC's and RAM chips method

[integer1980]

I read patnor's guide to buring and extracting the gold from various flatpacks/IC and followed it out.

First batch was on the north/south bridges and the IC module chips off of RAM. (about half a pound) Thought these to be the 'high grade' chips.
Second batch was on various ICs, mostly from motherboards and old peripheral cards after I trimmed the gold fingers from. Older sound cards and video cards and ICs from hard drive controller boards and a few RAM IC chip modules.

I did the chips per his directions. Burned in a pan where they turned white, pulverized them, burned some more then I ran a magnet over the metals. Took the magnetic stuff, threw it in a separate pile and washed the powder stuff in a black bowl. Once the water turned clear now all that I have is a glob of what looks like wet beach sand. I'll take some photos soon.

No trace of any gold what so ever. I figure I'd run a test batch to see if I get anything.

Am I doing something wrong? Have I even enough raw material to show *anything* at all? Perhaps the gold wires are corroded or tarnished in a way? Is their a follow up chemical process to clean the metals to show?

Any enlightenment will be well appreciated.
Thanks!
Still wet: I washed it until the water became clear. This is after my second pulverization:
http://imageshack.us/a/img705/1282/imag0040wf.jpg

Parts pulled out by magnet:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/109/imag0037u.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img705/1282/imag0040wf.jpg

 

[rheslin2]

in the first picture, of the burnt chips on paper, at the top of the screen it looks like im seeing gold fibers at the botom of the pan. when i get to this piont and there is to much solder or copper in the mix, i put it back in the pan, burn it again and recrush it to reduce the small chunks of plastic down to powder, then pan again, youll start seeing gold fibers, then i put the whole mess into a small container (smooth bottom bottle) and add hcl and swirl the bottle every so often for a few days, dumping it out and adding fresh hcl as it desolve tin and copper, im left with gold fibers at the bottom and a few remaining copper wires, so i added some peroxide (just a few drops) to the next hcl and was left with just gold wires, keeps going, your doing it right, good luck and keep us updated on your success

 

[nmlfreitas]

Hello
It seams to me that you have not crushed them correctly. You must have something that looks like really fine powder.
After that you wash it and wait until the gold settles and you should be able to see some "yellow".

 

[Marcel]

1. If your temperature is too high, bond wires will melt into tiny gold balls - hard to track.
2. The panning and seperating of the gold and other stuff, takes a lot of p-a-t-i-e-n-c-e. If you are a hurry guy like me, you will never get to the goal (I tried it but it wasnt for me)
3. You should have crunched and washed the solids, most of the pyrolized stuff goes away with the water.
4. If everything fails: AR

 

[nmlfreitas]

4. If everything fails: AR

Marcel are you saying that after heating and crushing you can
Process the powder directly into AR? Have you tried?

 

[Marcel]

4. If everything fails: AR

Marcel are you saying that after heating and crushing you can
Process the powder directly into AR? Have you tried?

Well I wanted to keep it short but you can always use the AR process for extracting values from such a mixed compound.
Of course you should follow the process line and this does not start with "dump it in AR".
Remove basemetals using dilute nitric. Keep the solution as Silver & Palladium also dissolves in there.
Wash remains etc. Siphon dirty water off.
Reduce all solids that will only require more AR (like glass pieces, leadframes that dont have gold on them, etc)
And then go for AR.

And yes after I failed to pan my gold wires I used AR to recover what was left from the tryout.

 

[jeneje]

I don't know about using AR from the start but I think using a mild HNO3 solution to remove base metal after washing might help. Then refine with AR adding HNO3 in very small amounts (using a dropper) and waiting for the reaction to quit before adding more may help. Just a though here.

Ken

 

[patnor1011]

If I do s/n bridge only then I am able to pan out all garbage and do have wires only with some sand from crushed Si chips.

If I do mixed IC there are a lot of internal metallic parts and pins so after incineration and light crushing I use magnet to remove magnetic pins and HNO3 to remove copper pins. Then I wash again and crush more. What is left can go to AR or HCl/Cl.

I try not to crush hard as I have found that when I use heavy crushing in my homemade mortar and pestle or ball mill gold wires will abrade or smear on copper pins present in mix. That is why I try to remove them before final crushing. Not that you cant recover this smeared gold from pins but I like to see gold in pan.

 

[nmlfreitas]

Hey guys
Please clear my mind about a question.
burn the chips until they are red hot. crush them next.
Remove metallic parts and remove metallic pins using a magnet.
Wash the powder with dilute nitric to remove base metals?
Can you do it this way?
If you go for AR are you able to get silver like we do it with ceramic processors?

 

[patnor1011]

Hey guys
Please clear my mind about a question.
burn the chips until they are red hot. crush them next. Here I will wash with water to get burned ashes out as dirty water
Remove metallic parts and remove metallic pins using a magnet.
Wash the powder with dilute nitric to remove base metals? Yes but after previous wash with water it will not be powder but more like sand or fine sand, magnetic pins were removed previously so dilute nitric will remove copper based pins.
Can you do it this way?
If you go for AR are you able to get silver like we do it with ceramic processors?
Yes. Silver if present, will be already removed when you will be washing with dilute nitric. Rest of it (if any) will be removed when you process magnetic pins and parts removed with magnet.

 

[nmlfreitas]

Yes. Silver if present, will be already removed when you will be washing with dilute nitric. Rest of it (if any) will be removed when you process magnetic pins and parts removed with magnet.

Hey there Pantor
When you wash with dilute nitric should it be hot?how is silver removed with washing?
Sorry so many questions but I have never worked with nitric and I'm trying to learn more about the process before
I give it a go.....

 

[butcher]

silver, palladium, copper and other base metals will dissolve in nitric acid usually 70% nitric acid and water diluted 50:50, even a little more dilute will work and help to keep fumes down somewhat, this is usually put with metal without heat in the beginning, as the reaction can generate its own heat, but as the reaction is slowed down heat is used to keep the reaction going, if heated to concentrate some of the metal nitrates like silver may form, these are water soluble.

The silver and palladium will be dissolved into solution with the base metals; the solution could be blue from copper or have a green color, from palladium in solution or unreacted nitric acid.

The silver and then the palladium can be removed from the nitrate solution; the simplest method is to use a bar of copper metal, to cement out silver metal and then palladium as metal powders.

Dissolving metals in nitric acid can create some deadly NOx gases, there are several of these nitrous oxide gases that form some are highly visible red fumes of NO2 nitrous dioxide, but some of these dangerous gases are not visible, care should be taken to protect yourself and other from these.

The reaction with metals can be very vigorous, especially with fine metal or powders and very reactive metals, these can cause boilovers, foaming everything out of your vessel, also when free nitric is heated, or concentrated to its azeotropic point (especially in a solution with HCl) the nitric can also cause foaming and boil over’s, if heat is not lowered before the boilover occurs.

To help with your questions reading Hoke's book and doing the getting acquainted experiments will help to give you a better understanding of the reactions with metals.

 

[nmlfreitas]

Thanks for clearing my questions Butcher, only one more question.
When you are doing the base metals separation, with nitric, you wait until the reactions stops and then we have nitric with diluted silver and possibly Palladium.
You need to filter the solution to end up with processed parts that have gold and don't dilute with nitric.right?
Is it better to "clean" those processed parts to take out the nitric or can you go strait to AR?
I'm asking because i use AR with HCL and Sodium Nitrate witch is better to control the reation.

 

[martyn111]

When you are doing the base metals separation, with nitric, you wait until the reactions stops and then we have nitric with diluted silver and possibly Palladium.

The correct terminology would be dissolved silver and possibly palladium rather than diluted silver and possibly palladium.

Good rinsing of the undissovled metals is a good idea to remove any remaining silver nitrate for recovery later, although leaving some silver nitrate wouldn't be detremental to the dissolution of the gold, the silver would precipitate out as silver chloride when the hydrochloric acid is added, and would be removed during filtering before precipitating the gold.

 

[butcher]

The material will dictate the process needed.
Sometimes we can chose one process or another, depending on what we are working with.
This is where having a good understanding of the different processes and what to expect can be very helpful.

Depending what materials we are working with, we will usually need pretreatments before dissolving the silver and base metals with our nitric treatment, this could be mechanical separation, inquartering or incinerating or even an acid treatment followed by washing and an incineration to remove previous acid salts, or other treatments, these pretreatments depending on what material we have can mean the difference in things working well or with us just ending up with one big mess.

What will not dissolve into the nitric solution will settle to the bottom, as insoluble powers or pieces of metals, sand or whatever, things in floating around in solution should be given time to settle, after settled the dissolved metal nitrate's in solution can be decanted (removed from insoluble powders).

Decanting can be done with several methods, carefully pouring off the solution, a small hose to siphon off the solution, off from the powders, or to suck it out with a suction bulb and pipette, not disturbing the insoluble powers, these powders are washed in water (normally hot water will hold more of the soluble salts), and also decanted added to the other solution we decanted, these liquids are filtered to a clean vessel.

A copper bar can be hung in the nitrate solution to cement silver metal powders and then palladium from the solution, when cementing process is complete, solution is then again separated from metals with decanting, the powdered metals are washed, and solution is treated for waste, using iron to precipitate copper from solution, again decanting solution, which is then treated with a base like NaOH to precipitate metal hydroxides (pH 9), the solution decanted from these insoluble hydroxides, and ph brought back to pH 7, forming a clear salt water safe for disposal, copper powders, and metal hydroxide powders are dried, copper can be reused or disposed of, as well as dried hydroxides.

The cemented silver can be dried melted and refined in an electrolytic cell.
Depending on how much palladium if any, and silver, these can be separated by other means besides the use of copper metal and the cementing process but we will not get into that here.

Back to the washed powders from the original nitric acid treatment, these depending on what was included could have gold or other platinum group metals, much depends on what they contain as to what treatment and what pretreatments we use, what we have in these powders will also dictate what our next step should be or what would work best, for example if we had a lot of gold with some platinum, we may wish to use cold aqua regia to dissolve most of the gold without getting too much of the platinum powders dissolved into solution, or if we are only dealing with gold we may choose to use aqua regia and a heated solution to make the gold go into solution easier.

Also depending on what these powders are and what condition they were I may choose a different chemical than aqua regia to dissolve them, HCl/NaClO (bleach) or HCl/32% H2O2, can be easier to deal with sometimes as the oxidizer can be easily removed

 

[butcher]

nmlfreitas,

You mentioned using aqua regia made from hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sodium nitrate (NaNO3).

This leads me to believe that you are also making your nitric acid (HNO3) with sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and sodium nitrate (NaNO3).

Homemade nitric will contain sulfate salts (even after we freeze out as much as possible) thus making our homemade nitric acid not a good thing to use if we have much silver and wish to recover the silver,

This homemade nitric acid would need to be distilled to be a more pure nitric free of sulfuric and sulfates if we wish to use it with silver.

Silver forms sulfates that are not very soluble at all. Silver sulfates will need to be converted to metal before melting, or melted in a flux containing iron, not something you would normally want to deal with.

 

[maynman1751]

The silver and then the palladium can be removed from the nitrate solution; the simplest method is to use a bar of copper metal, to cement out silver metal and then palladium as metal powders.

How then do you separate the silver from the palladium?

 

[nmlfreitas]

nmlfreitas,

You mentioned using aqua regia made from hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sodium nitrate (NaNO3).

This leads me to believe that you are also making your nitric acid (HNO3) with sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and sodium nitrate (NaNO3).

Hi butcher
No i have Nitric that i bought from drug store and also Sodium Nitrate. I don't make nitric.
I only mentioned Sodium Nitrate because i've always made AR with HCL and NaNO3.

 

[butcher]

If I had a solution of copper, silver and palladium nitrates, I could separate the silver and palladium somewhat.

What process I decided on would take the percentages of each of these metals in mind.
Here are some I would consider:

With high silver and only a little palladium, I think cementing on copper would be a good choice, I could just collect them together and separate in the silver cell,

Silver would cement before palladium, I could some what separate the two, by collecting the silver separately early in the process, and collecting the later cemented powders with higher palladium, this would not give a good separation, but can help somewhat.

If High in palladium I could use DMG to recover the palladium, then cement silver on copper or with HCl or NaCl.
DMG is $$, and voluminous to deal with.

I could use HCl to form silver chloride, keeping palladium in solution from the (persuado) aqua regia that would form in solution, and then recover the palladium with cementing or a deNoxing and chemical reagent process.
Silver chloride is something I do not like to deal with,

There are others, but much of the decision of what process to use would have to take into consideration percentage of metals involved, cost, and troubles with each method, which products formed and how much trouble they would be to deal with.

Another thing to consider would be to separate the metals in the earlier stages of recovery when possible, so that you do not have them to separate here, palladium will dissolve in an acidic oxidized solution of HCl (like aqua regia), silver will not to any extent, but here again much really depends on what materials your working with and what condition they are in, as to what the best choice of recovery or refining steps may give better results.

This is Where Hokes book can help, once you have read the book a couple of times you can step back and look at the overall picture she drew with her book, and see how she used different methods or processes to recover or refine based on what she was dealing with, I do not think she meant to write a recipe cook book to follow a certain recipe, but was trying also to write a book where the cook would learn the principles of cooking and could also have enough understanding to come up with some of his own recipe's depending on what he had to cook.

 

[maynman1751]

Richard, Thank You once again for your eloquent explanation. I just don't yet have the experience or understanding to see these things, so I ask. I'm sure that it will be helpful to other members too, to have this explained. I haven't really had a lot of time to practice or study. My wife has been sick for 5 years and bedbound for three of these years, so I don't have much free time. I do study when I have time, but it's difficult to understand without practical use. That and with age the old mind ain't what it used to be :roll:.
So in conclusion, I want to thank all of you here that have been generous enough to share your knowledge and help us dummies when we trip (maybe that was the wrong word! I did grow up in the 60's and 70's) :shock: :lol:. Wow man! Look at the colors!!!! :lol: