Help needed for fluxing SSN Leach precipitates

[Spunky1]

Hi, I need help on a flux recipe for my SSN Leach precipitates. I have tried a few variations with no luck just more of a mess. Is anyone familiar with or had luck firing their as precipitates? Any help would be great.

 

[butcher]

Why do you think you need flux?
What are you attempting to do with this flux Oxidize or reduce the gold?

If you give us more details of what you are doing or trying to do, maybe the problem is not a lack of good flux recipes but some other problem.

You should not need any flux to melt your gold. that is if you are just trying to melt it, and not smelt it.

 

[Geo]

SSN leaching is a recovery method at best. Perhaps you should try and refine the precipitates before trying to melt them.

 

[Spunky1]

I am using the SSN Leach on my concentrates. I am leaching in large batches. SSN is the only Leach that will extract all values from my material. With the amount of solution I precipitate from I use zinc to Drop the metals. Asat lists to put precips in lead foil and cupel. I have way to much precipitates to try and cupel it a little at a time. I did stop doing the dilute hcl scrub on precipitates due to some values dissolving into the hcl scrub which leaves me with some base metals in the precips. I am looking for help as to taking the precips down to a dore metal. From there I have a refiner that's interested in buying but need to reduce precipitates to metal first

 

[butcher]

Using zinc to cement the gold from the solution will also reduce several of the base metals with your gold, melting it at this point you could flux smelt the gold, but it would not make any sense to do so, as the gold is now in a powdered metallic form with the other base metals, a better option would be to refine the gold powder to a higher purity by removing the base metals before melting it.

Since the recovered gold precipitate and other base metals are in fine powdered form, using HCl and bleach (sodium hypochlorite)to put the gold back into solution to refine your gold, eliminate the problems normally ecountered with using nitric acid as the oxidizer and de-NOxing the solution before using a selective reducing agent to precipitate your gold.

 

[Spunky1]

I have figured out why the previous precipitates were so nasty, it was with the pre treat on the material. I now have a nice clean gold precip. My ? For anyone familiar with SSN precips or NaAucl4 is what would be the best way to melt it? Borax? A certain flux? I've spent the last few weeks correcting the Leach issues, I don't want to lose what I've recovered while trying to melt.

 

[nickvc]

If your precipitates are as fine as they look it may pay to dissolve them in HCl and bleach and then precipitate the gold out and then melt.

 

[Spunky1]

I redissolved them then used butyl diglyme to collect the gold and precipitated with oxalic. Looks really nice. Haven't melted any yet, gonna drop more before melting.

 

[Spunky1]

Well, melting was no success. Tried various ways, plain,borax, Chapman flux and nothing. Plain, just smoked some til almost gone. Borax it all went into slag.

 

[Platdigger]

I would say it is not gold.

simple as that

 

[Bentfunky]

Well, melting was no success. Tried various ways, plain,borax, Chapman flux and nothing. Plain, just smoked some til almost gone. Borax it all went into slag.

It's tough to suggest a solution with such a minimal description of the results of your smelting/melting attempts. However, here are some thoughts.

I can't speak to the appropriateness of using oxalic acid and your process. Ive never worked with butyl diglyme. However, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your process makes sense.

Firstly, if you dropped material from solutionn using oxalic acid, the dropped material should be clean gold powder, correct? If so, you should be able to take a small bit, drop it into a melting dish, and melt it a bit with a gentle flame from a propane torch. This will not melt the powder into a button, but you should be able to melt bits of the powder enough to see grains of yellow, shinny gold under magnification. If this doesn't work, then you probably don't have gold.

If you pass the above sanity check, then you have clean gold powder. You do not need to smelt this powder using something like chapmans flux. Chapmans and other such fluxes are used to induce specific chemical reactions that are required to give you metallic gold at the bottom of your crucible when you are done. Choice of flux depends on composition of the material that you are attempting to smelt gold from.

Clean gold powder just needs to be melted. Many people use borax as a flux for this. In this scenario, the reason for using borax is that it helps prevent you from vaporizing very fine gold powder when attempting to melt the gold. There are many videos online showing examples of this process.

If you have gold and you are having difficulty melting it, then others can offer better suggestions if you provide very detailed descriptions of each of your steps, what you expected to have at the end of each of those steps, and what you actually ended up with. Pictures help a lot.

 

[Spunky1]

I sent some samples of precipitates out for testing. With ray grimmer assay and AA it shows pgms being extracted with SSN, no gold. My last picture was oxalic acid precip, if no gold which pgm/ pgms would drop with oxalic acid? Out of curiosity I sent 2 samples for xrf, they showed Iridium and rhodium and zinc. The odd part with xrf reports was one showed zinc at 97% the other report showed zinc at 99%. The material is precipitated from SSN with zinc, rinsed with distilled water then scrubbed several times with dilute hcl to remove any excess zinc then rinsed well again. So my ? Is what pgms would zinc be an interference for in regards to xrf. With scrubbing there should be almost no zinc present.