Home built centrifuge - gold concenrates from IC's

[etack]

Anyone who has incinerated IC's knows that the resulting ash is very black, here are a few pictures to show the color of my concentrates coming out of my centrifuge.

Should make a very nice button.

I don't agree with this I just burnt 20+# and the ash was grey not black if its black you haven't burnt it far enough. My ash looks like coal ash when done. White grey and powdery is what my ash looked like, when wet it was considerably darker though.

As a side note this looks really cool. Have you thought of putting the rest in your melting furnace to see if you get a bar out of it and this might be a better idea than sending off powder. If you have any cemented silver would be what I would use. Just keep adding the bare to each batch till your all done that have the bar assayed.

Eric

 

[rusty]

Anyone who has incinerated IC's knows that the resulting ash is very black, here are a few pictures to show the color of my concentrates coming out of my centrifuge.

Should make a very nice button.

I don't agree with this I just burnt 20+# and the ash was grey not black if its black you haven't burnt it far enough. My ash looks like coal ash when done. White grey and powdery is what my ash looked like, when wet it was considerably darker though.

As a side note this looks really cool. Have you thought of putting the rest in your melting furnace to see if you get a bar out of it and this might be a better idea than sending off powder. If you have any cemented silver would be what I would use. Just keep adding the bare to each batch till your all done that have the bar assayed.

Eric

If i had access to an induction furnace to better homogenize the melt this is what i would have done.

Agreed the majority of chips come out gray, I don't cherry pick so I get black ash.

 

[rusty]

Is your plan to acid treat this material while the material is still fine powders, to further part the metals before trying to melt?

I am curious what would happen if you done a test run with a sludge of say some different types of metal shavings of different density, maybe the shavings easily recognized after words, like copper, brass, or zinc, or aluminum. Or other metals, so you could see how they separated by density, like a metal shaving and some mud to see if you could separate metal shavings from mud.

And I'm most curious if the centrifuge is capable of separating abraded silver from plated silver run through the ball mill loaded with abrasives.

 

[rusty]

As I near the bottom of the tub my tan mud is thinning out, scarcely getting any. What I'm getting now is more darker mud.

Here is whats left on the bottom of the first tub, it's more like coarse sand.

 

[rusty]

Well lookie here, the City of Edmonton uses a centrifuge in their electronics recycling center.

http://www.edmonton.ca/for_resident...-and-electronic-waste-recycling-facility.aspx

 

[butcher]

I would just be curios and pan a portion of bottom sands, and then spin some of them just to try to see what the difference would be.

 

[rusty]

I would just be curios and pan a portion of bottom sands, and then spin some of them just to try to see what the difference would be.

I viewed the course sand under 10x, no visible gold then fed some into the bowel it clogged up immediately no amount of water would dislodge it. Tomorrow I'm going to run the mud a second time, did a partial of it this evening and found that there are not much values left behind. It now takes twice as many bowel fills to get half the amount of cons you would normally get from virgin ash.

The sandy crap is the dregs left over from having sloshed the water around to stir up the silt, so I really did not expect to find any values. i just wanted to see how the centrifuge would handle the course sand it would have been beneficial should a person want to set up at a gold claim with a larger unit on their settling pond from the sluice. Fellow could offer a share of the take.

Another interesting thought, the fellow who owns the Ready Mix plant from were we used to live, the area is well known for gold and he washes his sand and sometimes environment lets out a permit to remove sand from the Fraser River bars during the winter months all the dregs from the wash plant go into a settling pond. It was a thought to rum some of this material one day should I be back in the neighborhood.

One plastic tobacco tub filled to the brim - 6 lbs. For you guys that like to play with numbers the diameter of the plastic tub is 4.469" X 6.406" high so thats about a pound to the inch.

 

[rusty]

The sheared material consisted of chips, capacitors, diodes, resistors and leds anything magnetic was removed.

Values expected to be recovered from the cons, Silver, Gold, Tantalum, Germanium, Palladium and Platinum have i over looked anything of which may be worthy.

 

[etack]

gallium you will need a lot to make any money but its there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium

Eric

 

[rusty]

Curious how many of our members would be interested in following this thread up with all of us contributing towards refining this 6.5 lbs on concentrates for all the recoverable metals keeping in mind that the material was pre leached once already using a dilute nitric acid.

This way we'll all be able to have a record on the return values.

In other words treat me the Noob I am and we'll document everything.

 

[rusty]

A few pounds of pins, I'm going to screen out the larger material than run the mud -yes through the centrifuge.

Bet you guys are getting tired of this machine already.

How to tell when your still getting good cons, it clings to the spoon while ash simply falls away clean.

I did manage to squeeze another 1.5 lbs of cons from my tailings.

edit to add picture. I ran a couple of liters from the pins wash water, what I got is mostly copper.

 

[Dan Dement]

Rusty,

Following your thread with lots of interest. I would like to comment on one thing you said concerning Induction Melters and melting this type of material. I have two Induction Melters and have fried both of them, The first time I was trying to melt rather clean bench Pt/Pd sweeps in my Titanium Casting machine. In Pt/Pd crucibles there is no graphite and all the Induction power passes thru the material and back into the machine. Last month, it was in my smaller wand melter which has a graphite crucible. I have been awaiting my new water coils of about 4 weeks and I have learned my lesson on trying to melt "sandy type" of materials.

The last time it was only $800 and the first time was very expensive. No more sandy type materials for me as I am just going to send it in to my refiner. I know this really does not apply much to your thread but I hoping others can learn from my mistakes.

Dan

 

[rusty]

Rusty,

Following your thread with lots of interest. I would like to comment on one thing you said concerning Induction Melters and melting this type of material. I have two Induction Melters and have fried both of them, The first time I was trying to melt rather clean bench Pt/Pd sweeps in my Titanium Casting machine. In Pt/Pd crucibles there is no graphite and all the Induction power passes thru the material and back into the machine. Last month, it was in my smaller wand melter which has a graphite crucible. I have been awaiting my new water coils of about 4 weeks and I have learned my lesson on trying to melt "sandy type" of materials.

The last time it was only $800 and the first time was very expensive. No more sandy type materials for me as I am just going to send it in to my refiner. I know this really does not apply much to your thread but I hoping others can learn from my mistakes.

Dan

Dan I think your experience with your induction furnaces should be made a sticky.

Somewhere I read this very same thing you commented on melting powdered metals. Humans are funny in which information they choose to retain all I could remember is that the induction furnace was very good at homogenizing the melt allowing for good pin samples to be taken then used for an assay.

 

[rusty]

I got it wrong, the gold lodged itself in behind the copper.

Some may recall that 45 gallon drum i had full of network cable plugs, that I fed into the hammer mill to liberate the pins. This is them that I'm now working on.

When I do a large lot of pins I use just enough nitric to etch the plated gold off leaving the pin basically intact, two days ago i started neutralizing the acid with urea then this evening decanted the liquid then added fresh water to assist with screening.

I might add that the cons gold and copper cling tighter to the spoon than the previous batch from ash.

Some may be wondering why i would purposely feed a couple of thousand dollars worth of gold through the centrifuge, it's a closed loop system you can not possibly loose your values. Besides had I choose not to i would have missed the opportunity to learn that my gold lodged behind the copper.

 

[rusty]

I'm thinking to mill up the next batch of mixed IC's and pins as they come off the boards, then make a concentrate before incinerating. Which at this point the material you have to deal with would only be a fraction of the original mass.

Now the kicker, from my observations from running my gold pin mud into cons the gold having a much denser specific gravity lodged itself into the bowel first with the majority of the copper skimming over the compacted surface layer of the more dense material back into tailings.

According to the table below, with the dynamics of how a concentrating centrifuge works, tin would be discarded back to tailings along with the lighter fractions. Of course the only way to know for sure would be to do periodic testing or have an assay done of your cons.

If you know what your feedstock contains and what the bowel is capturing and what is being discarded to tailings a fellow could process the cons from the bowel then go after values from tailings via a heap leach set up. it has now become obvious to me that there are certain values in my ash which have gone to tailings. Most of which we the home refiner would have discarded anyhow.

Here's where copper comes into the picture, because of its specific gravity and unique color this metal makes a good indicator, when your cons become loaded you'll know when your entering that zone of material you wish to quit recovering leaving the rest to tailings, assay then sell off. Which is the route i prefer to follow.

The elements coded in red would be expected as tailings while the green would be in the bowel cons

Carbon is 1.8-3.59
Germanium is 5.323
Gallium is 5.904
Tin 7.31
Iron is 7.894
Copper is 8.96
Nickel is 8.902
Silver is 10.5
Lead is 11.35
Tantalum is 16.654
Gold is 19.32
Palladium is 12.02
Rhodium is 12.41
Platinum is 21.45

 

[Dan Dement]

Rusty,

Two observations: First, I do lots of SG measurements in my cash outs and I want to point out that 24kt gold is in the 19. range but I doubt if you are dealing in pure gold. Most 14kt is more in the 13. range depending on the mixture so that needs to be in your figuring.
Second: One of my learning curves in trying to melt grainular mixtures and using my XRF. In taking readings on 6oo gram incinerated ash from bench sweeps. I was getting a high gold content of the sweeps at 65% and got excited as to the return for a Jeweler friend. Sent the sweeps into my refiner and I had the purity correct but the weight was only 40% of the of the expected weight. My latest XRF uses an upper silicon drift detector to measure the return of Xrays from the 4 bands. The limitation of this type and price range XRF ($40,000) is that it will not detect anything lower than the silicon which element 14 of the Periodic table which inludes Aluminum. Most of the polishing wheels are made out of Aluminum Oxide which is a form of silicon which is below the the level which my machine will detect hence it is invisible to my XRF. Now, that I melted looks very similar to what you are trying to do and if a high percentage of your mixture is silicon, it is going to be difficult to get it to metal.

Now I claim NO expertise in refining, I try to find and learn from other technologies. I find your experiments in the centrifuge very interesting and wonder if there is a practical application in seperating out the metals such as platinum from the lighter metals like palladium. I follow your experiments with great interest and appauld your efforts and sharing.

Hope my experience is useful to you.

Dan

 

[rusty]

Rusty,

Two observations: First, I do lots of SG measurements in my cash outs and I want to point out that 24kt gold is in the 19. range but I doubt if you are dealing in pure gold. Most 14kt is more in the 13. range depending on the mixture so that needs to be in your figuring.
Second: One of my learning curves in trying to melt grainular mixtures and using my XRF. In taking readings on 6oo gram incinerated ash from bench sweeps. I was getting a high gold content of the sweeps at 65% and got excited as to the return for a Jeweler friend. Sent the sweeps into my refiner and I had the purity correct but the weight was only 40% of the of the expected weight. My latest XRF uses an upper silicon drift detector to measure the return of Xrays from the 4 bands. The limitation of this type and price range XRF ($40,000) is that it will not detect anything lower than the silicon which element 14 of the Periodic table which inludes Aluminum. Most of the polishing wheels are made out of Aluminum Oxide which is a form of silicon which is below the the level which my machine will detect hence it is invisible to my XRF. Now, that I melted looks very similar to what you are trying to do and if a high percentage of your mixture is silicon, it is going to be difficult to get it to metal.

Now I claim NO expertise in refining, I try to find and learn from other technologies. I find your experiments in the centrifuge very interesting and wonder if there is a practical application in seperating out the metals such as platinum from the lighter metals like palladium. I follow your experiments with great interest and appauld your efforts and sharing.

Hope my experience is useful to you.

Dan

Very interesting Dan, from your information I can clearly see there is no danger of loosing any gold buy quiting the operation on saturated copper banding in the grooves.

Some of my projects had been started two years or more back, what I found is that buckets set aside with water and ash the heavier fractions formed a thick cemented layer. It is my belief that one could have decant the upper fractions leaving the precious metals behind, you virtually needed a jack hammer to loosen the cemented bottom layer.

The word I want to use to express myself currently escapes me, precious metals whetted have an affinity causing the particles as our friend Isaac Newton put it what goes up must come down fortunately precious metals whetted have an affinity for one another. They tend to form a heavy layer on the bottom of a pail left to stand a very long time so cemented together, that particular bottom layer actually squeezes the water out, you almost need a jack hammer to free it up.

I'm going to conduct a similar experiment using clear test tubes and my eriez vibrating unit to speed the process, hopefully there will be a visible color shift between the layers as they settle out and find their place in the specif gravity band where they belong.

As for separating platinum from palladium mechanically I do not see it possible.

 

[Dan Dement]

Rusty,

Thanks for the input. The answer to the Pd/Pt question is what keeps our friend Lou, a very busy man.

Dan

 

[rusty]

Rusty,

Thanks for the input. The answer to the Pd/Pt question is what keeps our friend Lou, a very busy man.

Dan

Your welcome Dan, i enjoy the input.

 

[rusty]

How many of you have one or more stock pots on the go, just as we were moving two years ago I ended up with at least a dozen. I was so discussed with the situation I never did bother taking count, but the elephant in the room awaits me.

Once i get caught up on what I'm working on, I'm going to run the cemented waste from these buckets through the new toy. Should make nice cons.