IC ashes processing using flux

[kjavanb123]

All,

I have still 24 lbs of incinerated / ball milled / non-ferrous and ferrous separated ash. I have tried panning, sluice, and blue bowl to separate the precious metals from the ash with very limited sucess and it is time consuming for such large quantity.
While using gravity separation methods on few gram sample, I noticed the ash contain mostly ash and tiny percentage copper, gold or silver and some ferrous metals. Now this be treated like a sweeps? Using flux to pool all the metals including PMs without using lithrage?
I tested a 93g ash, mixed with 88g of borax, and 4g of cryolite put in crucible and put it iinside my cupola furnace.
I watched it expand little inside the crucible, then shrank to 1/3 of volume, so poured it off to ground, tiny bits of metals were visible and some dark powder, which I put them in the ball mill until tommorow morning.
If using this pyro metho works on sweeps can similar flux be used for the ashes?

Thanks and regards
Kevin

 

[steyr223]

No answer
Did u ever figure this out
Thanks steyr223 rob

 

[kjavanb123]

Steyr223,

Thanks for your response. On page 219 of Hokes book, she metions if sweeps contain mostly carbounous materials, then usage of lithrage and stock flux is the best method to treat such materials.
Since we are breaking carbon used in ICs during incineration, then this formula should work, I will test this on a 100g samples and share the result here.

Thanks
Kevin

 

[g_axelsson]

If the IC material is properly incinerated there is no carbon left. Then you need to add another carbon source to the flux to reduce the litharge to lead so it can collect the gold.

Göran

 

[kjavanb123]

Goran,

Thanks for your tip. I went ahead snd tested 100g of ashes, mixed with basic flux (5 parts soda ash, 4 parts borax, and 1 part cryolite ), mixed it well with ash sample, actually I mixed 2:1 ration for flux to ash. Let it sit in my cupola furnace, and it was very flowing when I took it out for swirling. So I poured the mix in a mold, here is what it looks like.



Here is what I tried to use a cone shaped glass to concentrate a sample of incinerated ashes, it seems to be good, all the yellowish strips are gold, very fine gold.


Tommorow once I receieved the lead, and lithrage, I will try smelting.

Thanks
Kevin

 

[kjavanb123]

All,

I finally smelted 12kg 2-sided legged ICs scraped from telecomm boards, using 50%,soda ash, and 14kg lithrage and 12kg lead.

Here is the ashes mixed with soda ash, and some water added to make mix solid,


Mix in the furnace,


This is silver gold alloy after oxidizing and pouring the lead oxide,


Silver and any traces of copper being dissolved in nitric acid,


The brown powder left is gold,


So this 12kg of low grade ICs produced 5g of gold powder using lithrage lead and soda ash in a cupola furnace.

Regards,
Kevin

 

[kjavanb123]

Just a thought,

Since most of the epoxy materials for ICs are carbons, is it possible to crush and grinds ICs to fine powder, run them through a magnetite separator, then use lead/lithrage flux on the remaining ashes ? So this would be incineration as the cupolation.

Thanks
Kevin

 

[kjavanb123]

All,

I decided to duplicate the smelting process in my cupola furnace using the following flux,

100g soda ash
20g crushed glass
100g lithrage
100g lead metal

Mixed with;
100g of incinerated ashes from ICs

I am going to mix the flux with the ash with ratio of 1:1, melt the lead first in the crucible, then add the flux ash mix to it, and let it cook stir it few times with a steel rod to get a good mixture, pour it into a conical mold, remove the lead alloy, and use bone ash cupola to get the silver gold buttons.

Please advise if this plan need any changes.

Thanks and regards
Kevin

 

[Reno Chris]

I would also add about 10 gr of charcoal powder to help reduce the litharge.

 

[4metals]

Looking at your fusion ingredients I can't help but wonder how you will extract more values than your flux is worth.

When fire assaying your goal is to extract as much of the metal from the sample as possible and as a result the cost of the flux is secondary to a good result.

Ultimate recovery from the feedstock is another story. I do not expect that you are located in the US as lead is a RCRA metal and they (the EPA) are strict about its disposal here.

I just crunched some rough numbers based on the fact you stated of 5 grams from 12 kg of material.

that yields (at $1260 gold price) $202.55

you processed 100 grams of material per fusion in the test so the test was for 1/120 of the total. So $202.55/120=$1.69 worth of gold in a fusion.

Even if you double or triple it from concentration from incineration you are still under 5 bucks from 100 grams. Lead and litharge are costly, disposal is worse.

 

[kjavanb123]

4metals,

Thanks for your response. Are you suggesting to use gravity separation methods even ash feedstocks is larger than 30lb? So there is no way to use smelting to process large quantity of ICs?
I read through the posts here to figure out a right flux to be used for ICs incinerated ashes to increase the recovery rate. All I have now is a small cupel furnace with crucible at maximum you can put 200g of ashes. This was an experiment to see if it is worth to scale it up so I can do 20lbs at once, collect the lead bullion and use the bone ash crucible to collect the precious metals and I assume this way lead is also can be recovered later.

Back to my experiment,
108g incinerated IC ash,
120 g lead
20g lead oxide
88g sodium carbonate
10g charcoal powder
5g cryolite

Mixed in my ball to hve the following color,


Since my crucible is small I ran it in 3 batches, here is the result after the first batch, lead bullion weighed 129g


Second run using the same lead from the previous run, and this time leqd bullion weighed 136g

Third run using the same lead bullion as before, it weighed 136g


I am going to continue this process until I make a crucible out of Portland cement to cupol the resulting lead alloy.


Thanks
Kevin

 

[kjavanb123]

All,

I incinerated 2.700kg mixed ICs, and tried washing them using dam separator, picture below,



Here is the result,


Another shot,


I have put them into dilute nitirc leach to remove copper. Then incinerate again, follow by AR.

Regards
Kevin

 

[Sk8rguy]

so i read down about 20-30 post. i know its old as well.

watch a video fine gold panning. you use the same concept knock your heavy's to one side wash the rest away. always into another container just in case.Use this should help get a cleaner concentrate. next you could smelt like your doing which now your not spending as much $ smelting a whole lot of extra ash and nothing. and ive only read up on it thousands of time but haven't tried it. electrolysis in aqua solutions. hcl,and sulfuric acid from what ive read work well.