The gold in the slag is there because the metalloid coating prevents the beads from coalescing into the smelt pool.
If you separate the beads from the slag and smelt them you will have exactly the same conditions which got those beads into the slag in the first place.
Best of luck in trying to assay the slag by conventional methods.
The coatings prevent the beads entering the lead pool in a fire assay and they stop the beads dissolving in any form of wet chemistry type assay.
I did a major project on gold assaying of beads in slag for a company which was interested in such.
The bulk of the work was carried out on slag generated from the smelting of gold resulting from stripping of carbon in a commercial CIP stripping plant.
The slag was jaw crushed and passed over a 2mm screen, gold pieces larger than 2mm were picked from the screen and all the rest of the slag was re-milled to less than 2mm.
Both fire assay and wet chemistry showed values of around 130ppm gold in the minus 2mm slag on multiple subsamples of the slag.
Subsamples of the minus 2mm slag were then tabled with the average gold recovered from the gold line on the table weighing in at around 1500ppm.
Subsamples of the table mids and tails were then run through 24 hour bottle rolls in dilute leaches with high cyanide levels in the bottles.
The average gold recovered from these bottle rolls was around 1100ppm.
This meant that the gold recovered by gravity and leaching was 1500 + 1100 = 2600ppm, this compares with the 130ppm assay values.
Thus 95% of the gold did not report to standard assay methods but was recovered by gravity and modified bottle roll.
Similar results were gained for slags from e-waste smelting and other sources when run through the same processes.
If the gravity gold was smelted as a separate operation the bulk of the gold prills did not report to the gold pool, they had distributed themselves through the slag.
If the prills were given the HCl treatment then virtually all of the prills reported to the gold pool on smelting.
Deano
If you separate the beads from the slag and smelt them you will have exactly the same conditions which got those beads into the slag in the first place.
Best of luck in trying to assay the slag by conventional methods.
The coatings prevent the beads entering the lead pool in a fire assay and they stop the beads dissolving in any form of wet chemistry type assay.
I did a major project on gold assaying of beads in slag for a company which was interested in such.
The bulk of the work was carried out on slag generated from the smelting of gold resulting from stripping of carbon in a commercial CIP stripping plant.
The slag was jaw crushed and passed over a 2mm screen, gold pieces larger than 2mm were picked from the screen and all the rest of the slag was re-milled to less than 2mm.
Both fire assay and wet chemistry showed values of around 130ppm gold in the minus 2mm slag on multiple subsamples of the slag.
Subsamples of the minus 2mm slag were then tabled with the average gold recovered from the gold line on the table weighing in at around 1500ppm.
Subsamples of the table mids and tails were then run through 24 hour bottle rolls in dilute leaches with high cyanide levels in the bottles.
The average gold recovered from these bottle rolls was around 1100ppm.
This meant that the gold recovered by gravity and leaching was 1500 + 1100 = 2600ppm, this compares with the 130ppm assay values.
Thus 95% of the gold did not report to standard assay methods but was recovered by gravity and modified bottle roll.
Similar results were gained for slags from e-waste smelting and other sources when run through the same processes.
If the gravity gold was smelted as a separate operation the bulk of the gold prills did not report to the gold pool, they had distributed themselves through the slag.
If the prills were given the HCl treatment then virtually all of the prills reported to the gold pool on smelting.
Deano