I received 6.5Kg of incinerated and ball-milled ash back from a large refinery here in Germany. I was not satisfied with their work and this portion was not yet refined just made to ash and send back to me in a steel bucket.
Now this ash was made from transistors and similiar 3-legged components, they where factory new and the original weight was 24Kg.
I suspect the refiner to have kept all the sieved material, because the reduction of the mass, seems to be too much.
I dont really mind that, because most of the material that could not be milled to fine powder should have been the copper leads, plated with tin.
So now I have a dry very fine concentrate. I tested it with magnets and only found very little magnetic material in it (maybe 5%).
I then dissolved 10g in Aqua Regia, tested it with SC and got a very strong reaction, but no color to it. (the greenish solution on the swap turned transparent). Further testing found the expected silver in it.
I boiled down the solution to a point where white crystals precipitated all at once. Filtered that and ran some water over them which made them dissolve and turn into the well known blueish solution.
So my assumption was that the crystals were made of AgNOx , because they are well soluable in water.
I even tried to put 200g in my furnace and roast it at around 1200°C, hoping for the metalparticles to get to each other and form larger nuggets, even if that would mean "dirty" alloys" . But the ash is just too fine and wont allow the mini silver particles to find each other.
Used a spyglass and a microscope and was able to see small balls of silver and what looked like gold (very little gold).
Now my question is, what would you suggest to to with this concentrate in order to recover the values effectively?
I suppose to have silver in a economic scale in that powder, very little gold and prob. very little Pd.
I do not care too much about the Au and the Pd, since I suppose it is not enought to set up a seperate process. But what about the silver?
Leaching such fine powder is a real pain. It takes long, it requires a lot of chemicals and has to be redone several times.
Now this ash was made from transistors and similiar 3-legged components, they where factory new and the original weight was 24Kg.
I suspect the refiner to have kept all the sieved material, because the reduction of the mass, seems to be too much.
I dont really mind that, because most of the material that could not be milled to fine powder should have been the copper leads, plated with tin.
So now I have a dry very fine concentrate. I tested it with magnets and only found very little magnetic material in it (maybe 5%).
I then dissolved 10g in Aqua Regia, tested it with SC and got a very strong reaction, but no color to it. (the greenish solution on the swap turned transparent). Further testing found the expected silver in it.
I boiled down the solution to a point where white crystals precipitated all at once. Filtered that and ran some water over them which made them dissolve and turn into the well known blueish solution.
So my assumption was that the crystals were made of AgNOx , because they are well soluable in water.
I even tried to put 200g in my furnace and roast it at around 1200°C, hoping for the metalparticles to get to each other and form larger nuggets, even if that would mean "dirty" alloys" . But the ash is just too fine and wont allow the mini silver particles to find each other.
Used a spyglass and a microscope and was able to see small balls of silver and what looked like gold (very little gold).
Now my question is, what would you suggest to to with this concentrate in order to recover the values effectively?
I suppose to have silver in a economic scale in that powder, very little gold and prob. very little Pd.
I do not care too much about the Au and the Pd, since I suppose it is not enought to set up a seperate process. But what about the silver?
Leaching such fine powder is a real pain. It takes long, it requires a lot of chemicals and has to be redone several times.
