Incinerated ICs running on shaker table

[kurtak]

72chevel,

Thanks for your words. As of now I plan to remove tin, lead, and zinc using dilute hydrochloric acid, follow by rinses of hot water, then dissolve all the rest of base metals in dilute nitric acid, that should leave me with tantalum, gold, which can be dissolved in AR, drop the gold, and isolate the tantalum.

Nitric solution that contains palladium, silver, copper, I was thinking to use aluminum foils from aluminum capacitors to drop the copper from nitrate solution, precipitate silver as chloride, and palladium accordingly.

This new batch will give me some number as for the weight for each concentrates, and it will certainly uses a lot chemicals vs dissolving whole boards.

Regards
Kevin

Note the underlined in the above quote

You will "not" drop "anything" from a nitrate solution with aluminum --- Aluminum "does not" react with nitric - in fact it is a way of testing if a piece of scrap metal is aluminum or zinc

Zinc will react with both HCl & nitrict

aluminum will react with HCL but not nitric

so if you have a piece of metal & you are not sure if its aluminum or zinc use a drop of nitric - if it reacts it is zinc - if it does not react it is aluminum

Kurt

 

[kjavanb123]

Kurt,

I was reading adding some NaCl to copper nitrate and alumium foils in it would remove the oxide layer on Al foils, and it allow it to react and produce copper powder. Please advise as this is much faster than using iron scrap.

Regards,
Kevin

 

[kurtak]

Kevin

Use iron :!: - with a bubbler set up in it to circulate the solution in the tank - circulation will speed the cementing up & will prevent the copper from adhering to the iron & allow for more complete cementing - circulation is key to success when cementing large volumes of solution

Kurt

 

[Beirdo]

Their videos are both eye opening... and strangely entertaining. Watching various items getting pulverized in their hammer mill made for a fun evening. Now what I'm wondering is what I'd do with all of the solder and copper parts that were in the low-grade concentrates. I know there are refiners out there for base metals, and separated like that, it might even be worth trying to send them some material to process, even if the return was minimal... Certainly better than the trash, at least.

Any plans what to do with the various stuff from the video with the circuit boards?

 

[kjavanb123]

Berido,

If you were asking me what I would do with discharged materials, here it is,

1- Metals and small amount of plastics and resins that made it to hole 1 of shaker table, I would remove iron, nickel and titanum from the dried materials using Nd magnets, then dissolve tin, lead, zinc and any other metals soluble in warm dilute hydrochloridric acid for 2 hrs.
Rinse and incinerate, then using electrolysis to plate tin, and lead is precipitate as white lead chloride as solution cools down.

2- Dissolve the metals in step 1, in hot dilute nitric acid, this would remove pretty much most of base metals, and gold, tantalum and some plastic resins remain. Rinse and incinerate this nitrate solution, drop silver as silver chloride, palladium and copper.

3- Dissolve the metals left from previous step, in AR, filter and drop the gold, and remain is going to be tantalum and some resins or ceramics etc, which can be separated using blue bowl to recover the tantalum which I think by then is going to be tantalium pentoxide.

I was thinking to use the similar procedures on all other materials discharged from shaker table holes, except the tailing which contains only trace amount of metals of my interest.

Also I will use 304 stainless steel vessels for all my nitric acid reaction, 316 stainless steel for hcl reaction and glass beaker for AR bath.


Regrads,
Kevin

 

[ericrm]

I was thinking to use the similar procedures on all other materials discharged from shaker table holes, except the tailing which contains only trace amount of metals of my interest.

is your tailing the number 4 hole or is there a fifth hole?

 

[kjavanb123]

Hi,

Tailing discharges at number 4 hole on shaker table.

Regards,
Kj

 

[4metals]

316 stainless steel for hcl reaction

This is a mistake, reducing acids do not have the oxidizing properties that stainless steel needs to maintain their passive surface corrosion layer. It will corrode. Try titanium.

 

[Lou]

Neither titanium nor stainless are good for HCl work.

Glass, tantalum, polyolefins, fluorinated plastics.

 

[ericrm]

Hi,

Tailing discharges at number 4 hole on shaker table.

Regards,
Kj

ok... it seem that the shaker table does not work as good as i was hoping it to be. thanks

 

[kjavanb123]

Eric,

How did you reach that conclusion?

Regards
Kevin

 

[ericrm]

im glad you ask, i have read your assay result and even if they dont say a lot about gold content they say a lot about what want wrong.
since number 4 is your discarded material it will have the most material by weight of your 4 hole ,roughtly 80% of you input weight. if you go by the math here it would mean that for each 2000lbs of pulverised board that goes tru you shaker table 1600 lbs will endup in hole 4. from your assay Au 1.6 oz/t Ag 10.8oz/t for each 2000lbs of board you will process 1.28oz of gold and 8.64oz will endup in hole 4.
the shaker did not separate the gold from garbage material at all. the reason why the hole 4 seem to have so little value is not because there is little gold in it but because the gold is diluted in a massive amount of garbage.

anyway your tread have been very helpfull maybe not for the reason i though in the beginning but still very usefull

 

[kjavanb123]

Eric,

I think there is a mishnderstanding here as far as the assay result goes. For port 4 assay says 1.6 toz per metric ton, so according to your calculation 2000lbs of tailing discharged from port 4 contains 1.6 toz, since 80% of feed in load with be 2000 x 80% or 1600 lbs of tailing would contain 1.6 toz x 1600 divided 2000 or 1.26 toz of gold in tailing which if you compare with gold content of other ports is trace amount.

Steve ran my second batch of 13lbs minus mesh 30 circuit boards and this time sent the entire discharged materials to american analytical services to be dried and weigh them, follow by sampling from each bag and run assays.

This time we keep track of all weights, in and discharged, so we can accurately find out the recovery rate of table and content of each metals in ppm for the boards.

I think gravity separation is a very good way to avoid smelting and incineration processes.

Regards
Kevin

 

[alexxx]

so according to your calculation 2000lbs of tailing discharged from port 4 contains 1.6 toz, since 80% of feed in load with be 2000 x 80% or 1600 lbs of tailing would contain 1.6 toz x 1600 divided 2000 or 1.26 toz of gold in tailing which if you compare with gold content of other ports is trace amount.

I was talking again with Steve about this issue last week, and we came to the conclusion that a 80%/85% recovery with this process is a huge step forward.
Sometimes, chasing a 98-99% is not worth it. Fantastic if you can achieve it, but it's not a deal breaker.
If you can recover 80% of your values fast, with very little cost, that means good money in your pockets very fast.
That also means the ability of buying, processing and running more material everyday as your cash flow allows you to flip your inventory and process more volume.

I would prefer personally to run 2 mt a day for a 80% recovery than 2 mt a week for 95% recovery...

We were also talking about the perspective of sending those tailings containing decent Pm traces to a refiner after the first recovery from the table.
You get 80% to 85% of the good stuff fast, than you send the garbage tailings to the refiners. You will lose a small % of the remaining 15-20% sent to the refiners and the payout will be delayed in time (120 days), but you will keep the top dollars in your hands. Just consider the tailings as gravy, These low grade tailings could be accumulated easily to reach a 20mt minimum and sent to a refiner for a 575 / 600$ processing fee per mt. 1.6 Toz per mt is way more than the minimal payable % on Au.

my2c

Alex

 

[kjavanb123]

Alex,

Excellect point on tailings. Never thought about that option, and they do get accumlated fast. I plan to process 1mt per day with this system.

Glad you and Steve are discussing this, he has been very helpful and interested in this project.

Regards,
Kevin

 

[alexxx]

Kevin,

another important thing to remember if you plan on sending those tailings to a refiner is the following; this is your safety net if anything goes wrong...
We has refiners have learned not to throw anything away unless you are sure there's no more values to be extracted...
We keep stock pots, we save old filters and crucibles, etc...

Do you remember the first batch of AR you ever made ? Mine was a total disaster... Silver chloride was mixed with some remaining foils, metastannic acid was also there in large quantity, I used too much nitric, discarted filters full of values, added way too much smb into my copper saturated gold pregnant solution... A big mess...
Years later, after practice, experiments, mistakes, adjustments I'm getting better at it...

Like any other "new process" we try, it needs some tuning to optimize it. You need to know your tools, your material and gain some experience from various "bad runs"...
During this whole learning process, you need to cover your but. Sending those tailings, and even maybe the middlings to a refiner will be the safe way to go.
We've seen a whole bunch of things to be adjusted already like water pressure, table angle, slurry density... Maybe you will put a pre-wash module to create a more uniform slurry prior to running it into the table...

Keep up the good work !

Alex

 

[Erceg]

72chevel,

Thanks for your words. As of now I plan to remove tin, lead, and zinc using dilute hydrochloric acid, follow by rinses of hot water, then dissolve all the rest of base metals in dilute nitric acid, that should leave me with tantalum, gold, which can be dissolved in AR, drop the gold, and isolate the tantalum.

Nitric solution that contains palladium, silver, copper,

I may be wrong but wouldn't HCl in first bath convert silver into silver chloride which is insoluble in HNO3 ?


(edit - grammar)

 

[kurtak]

72chevel,

Thanks for your words. As of now I plan to remove tin, lead, and zinc using dilute hydrochloric acid, follow by rinses of hot water, then dissolve all the rest of base metals in dilute nitric acid, that should leave me with tantalum, gold, which can be dissolved in AR, drop the gold, and isolate the tantalum.

Nitric solution that contains palladium, silver, copper,

I may be wrong but wouldn't HCl in first bath convert silver into silver chloride which is insoluble in HNO3 ?


(edit - grammar)

No - HCl alone does not react with silver metal unless there is also an oxidizer added to the HCl such as AR - in which case the nitric in the AR reacts with the silver but then the HCl converts it to AgCl as fast as the nitric dissolves it

Same thing with copper - HCl alone does not react (dissolve) copper - it needs an oxidizer - which is why hydrogen peroxide along with a bubbler is added to HCl to make AP work to dissolve copper &/or brass to relieve the foils from pins & fingers

On the other hand aluminum does not react with nitric even though it is a more reactive metal then silver or copper - but aluminum is very reactive to HCl - which is why aluminum can not be used to cement lower reactive metals (silver or copper) from a nitrate solution

Kurt

 

[Grelko]

HCl alone does not react with silver metal unless there is also an oxidizer added to the HCl such as AR

HCl alone does not react (dissolve) copper - it needs an oxidizer - which is why hydrogen peroxide along with a bubbler is added to HCl to make AP work
Kurt

Doesn't this mean that HCL+H2O2 can dissolve silver also? If so, it would most likely be dependent on the % of H2O2.

I believe this works with HCL/CL, it would explain why you need the ammonia rinse, depending on the materials processed.

 

[Geo]

HCl does react to silver but because silver chloride is insoluble, only the first couple of atoms deep are effected. Once these first few atoms are converted to silver chloride, it prevent any further attack on the silver by the HCl. Any other oxidizer besides nitric acid have no effect on solid silver. When the silver is finely divided, as in cemented silver, a couple of atoms deep may be half the thickness of the particles and you can get a decent amount of silver chloride with just HCl and bleach even though I don't think the bleach has much to do with it.