How to separate silver and copper?

[Ragnor]

Hello I have some mixed metal nuggets from a mining district that has Copper, Silver, gold , pge. I have mixed metal nuggets from that area. If I dissolve the nuggets in nitric that will put the copper and silver in solution together. Knowing that copper precipitates silver I start to wonder how all that is going to work? Anyone care to explain?

 

[nickvc]

If you have a low enough base metal or silver based nugget it will dissolve the silver and many base metals leaving the gold and any other element not affected by nitric, if you have PGMs and reasonable silver content the PGMs will also dissolve in the nitric, by then cementing the solution with copper the silver and some of the PGMs will be removed from the solution, if you keep the solution moving you should remove all the PGMs.
To remove the PGMs you need to use a silver cell to separate the silver from the PGMs.
Hope that answers your questions.

 

[Lino1406]

To separate silver from silver and copper nitrate solution:
add KCl solution to get silver chloride precipitate;
rinse the precipitate with water;
add caustic soda to get Ag2O; rinse with water; take to melting