Help identifying what went wrong

[Williamjf77]

I was processing some bga chips and decided to give smelting a try so I measured and fluxed the concentrated material and added in some silver and melted the crucial. I got a bead that grew by 2.3 grams.

I had previously smelted a bead out of bga material after I had treated the material with nitric. 3.3 grams of some dirty looking gold.

Then I took both beads and another 2 gram bead of some real dirty gold and put all three in a melting dish to inquart with 18 grams of silver, melted and then corn flaked, all is good.
Then treated with nitric,rinsed and dissolved in aqua regia and got a weird color solution with a fluffy undissolved material in the pics

What could the material be to survive nitric and then aqua regia.

I definitely had some silver chloride. I have since melted it into a bead.



This is what it looked like in the filter

 

[FrugalRefiner]

I doubt you needed to inquart your beads. Inquartation is used when the silver content of gold is over 10% or so. At that level it will create a crust when gold is dissolved in AR that will prevent some of the gold from dissolving. Your beads probably didn't contain that much silver, so you probably could have gone straight to AR.

My guess would be that after the nitric, you still had some silver in the middle of your granulated gold.

Try soaking the material in some ammonia. Then decant the ammonia and promptly add some HCl or salt solution. If you had AgCl in the mix, it will dissolve in the ammonia, and reprecipitate with the addition of HCl or NaCl.

Dave

 

[Williamjf77]

I thought it was silver, I thought after using silver as a collector metal I should make the silver concentration @75 percent I will try to get rid of the AgCl as you suggest.

 

[FrugalRefiner]

After reviewing your first post, you may have been right to inquart. I misread it and thought your bead was 2.3 grams, not that it gained 2.3 grams in silver.

I'll again emphasize that you need to reacidify the ammonia promptly after you use it to dissolve silver chloride. If you leave silver in an ammoniacal solution, it can form explosive compounds. So after you use it to dissolve silver chloride, add sufficient HCl to precipitate all the silver and make the solution acidic.

Dave