Help needed in yield estimate telephone cards

[archeonist]

I am surprised that a Chemistry Teacher has not studied how metal alloys and amalgams work.
Where are you, In my younger day's we use to take weekend in Rotterdam. There where some great clubs hidden in it's industrial district's.
But have not had time for a holiday for over ten years. :lol:

J. I am in the Netherlands (Holland), I live near the city of Arnhem, about 100 km from Rotterdam. The whole metalurgy is a science by it self, during a chemistry study you are only informed about the basic Chemistry principles that occur in many situations. I understand how alloys work, but understanding and applying the understood theory in practice is a different kind of skill. It is like reading and writing.
Interesting to see a lot of people doing great in applying Chemistry, I know for sure a lot of them don't have a Chemistry background, so tumbs up! On the other side it sometimes scares me a bit seeing people working without the proper safty precautions like gloves for instance or using the kitchen! :shock: as a labratory, terrible thought!

 

[archeonist]

Ahhhh.., saturday evening a beer, television, and popping a thousand cards. Cheers! :mrgreen:

 

[g_axelsson]

Only 999 to go! :mrgreen:

Cheers!

Göran

 

[archeonist]

Finished them in just over an hour 8)

 

[Barren Realms 007]

Finished them in just over an hour 8)

Yea But did you get the wires inside?

 

[archeonist]

Yep, got everything, the whole chips. Tomorrow this test batch will get an AP bath, so I can collect the foils. After that I will incinerate the rest..
I'll post pictures of the process.

 

[kurtak]

Stop complicating what is really a simple process :!:

There is NO need to run them in CuCl2 (AP) to first recover the foils & then incinerate to recover the bonding wires

regardless of whether you choose to go with smelting or leaching - do it ALL in one recovery process

incinerate them AS IS --- then ether smelt them - OR - leach them --- done deal

You will save time (lots of time) you will create less waste (lots less) & you will suffer less value loss (the more steps you put in the process the more chance of value loss - at each step)

Kurt

 

[nickvc]

Excellent advice as usual from Kurt.

 

[patnor1011]

Stop complicating what is really a simple process :!:

There is NO need to run them in CuCl2 (AP) to first recover the foils & then incinerate to recover the bonding wires

regardless of whether you choose to go with smelting or leaching - do it ALL in one recovery process

incinerate them AS IS --- then ether smelt them - OR - leach them --- done deal

You will save time (lots of time) you will create less waste (lots less) & you will suffer less value loss (the more steps you put in the process the more chance of value loss - at each step)

Kurt

AP can be reused so there is no more waste created than usual. Another point is that he is keeping eyes on gold all the time.
You suggest direct leach of incinerated material but for that there will be more AR needed compared to amount needed for panned wires. Majority of base metals will dissolve in AP.
There is value loss risk here too - if he will not incinerate completely there will be carbon present and that may suck out some gold from direct leach.
Smelting presents potential loss to people who do not have experience doing so. It require addition of other chemicals to thin melt and if not done correctly then again bits of metals can be lost in slag. Smelted material will need to be further processed anyway. In my opinion there is no need to melt bonding wires and plating along with copper and nickel present there when AP (and quick nitric bath after incineration) will sort them out.

I am convinced that AP - incineration - panning - AR on concentrate and foils may be better suited in his case as he process quite a lot of material.

 

[archeonist]

Guys, what does the word 'leach' means? Is it like dissolving everything in AP in this case?

 

[FrugalRefiner]

You'll find many of the terms we use in A Glossary of Common Terms.

Dave

 

[archeonist]

You'll find many of the terms we use in A Glossary of Common Terms.

Dave

Thanks!

 

[archeonist]

Well there we are, chips are soaking in AP. The picture is about 4 hours into the reaction, the first foils already are starting to come loose.

 

[archeonist]

After a few days almost all of the chips were stripped. Under the copper layer where the gold foil was on, there seems to be more visible gold, a dot with several small dots surrounding it. They were not stripped, I think because they are embedded in the chip so the etching solution can't reach it. After I separated the foils (in the picture there is only a part of the total amount of foils) I incinerated the resulting chips with the golden dots an grind them to a fine powder.
Now I have to take the next step, should I go straight into AR or should I pan the gold out? Point is, I expect there to be extremely small gold particles that I for sure will not catch. Straight AR will give me a very dirty gold solution. What would you guys recommend?

 

[patnor1011]

You do exactly what I did. Now, do not be concerned about possible loss of some plating from "dots", they amount to mere cents not even that. Do pan a little to remove carbon and concentrate bonding wires. I do believe that bonding wires account to more than 3/4 of all the gold which is there. Pan slowly so only dirty water is discharged in that way you will not lose next to nothing. Reduce amount you are starting with to lets say 1/4 but I would go and reduce it to just 10%.
I then washed it quickly with soak in warm nitric to remove small bit of copper and nickel from under plating of "dots" and then AR to dissolve bonding wires. If you will leave a bit more of carbon there then do just AR on concentrate, then filter it and add foils to filtered AR.

 

[archeonist]

Thanks Patnor, I will follow your advice! I'll return later to show the results for the rest of the process.

 

[archeonist]

Well the panning was quite easy and there is more gold in there than I expected. The gold is the brownish yellow stuff at the top, the rest are mainly copper particles.

Partnor, you advise a hot nitric bath, for not more than 5 minutes or so?

 

[patnor1011]

Warm is enough just to dissolve that copper.

 

[archeonist]

The result I got from 1000 cards is 0.297g

 

[user 50596]

Sorry to hijack the thread as a new member but I run a mobile phone business and we get lots of old sims - mainly "timed out" new sims but also ex-customers etc. I have enough to fill a 1 litre ice-cream tub to the top - maybe about 5,000 but impossible to count them all - I could be way out in the estimate as it is about 1 years accumulation.

We used to sell to an old gold dealer who visited our town ( who used to pay about 2p a sim ) but he has retired now. Most have been cut down to "nano" size ( the tiny sim size that fits an iphone 5 ). I was going to list them on ebay but would prefer to sell direct to the trade as some will have personal info on them like messages and/or contacts. anybody interested then PM me - I can weight them / photo them as required. )

Brian