Non-Chemical Incineration

[glondor]

Well I am pleased to say I finally found a company willing to incinerate for me! We will do a trial run tomorrow. I am taking 15 lbs of flatpacks off of memory, 10 lbs of hard drive boards, 10 pounds of pin blocks from cell boards and 10 pounds of fingerless memory.. 850 degrees in oven, 1700 degree afterburner. Other than putting a loose cover on the steel pails is there anything else i should know? The oven operator has not done this type of material before and is very interested. Interested enough to do the first run for free! It is a commercial oven for industrial parts burn off. Now if I only had a ball mill.....

 

[Barren Realms 007]

What kind of memory do you have that has flatpacks?

I would be more concerned loosing values from the boards than the pins.

 

[Harold_V]

That's not hot enough. You should heat to the point of combusting carbon, or about 1.100°F.

Harold

 

[Frankk12]

When I incinerate I use an old hot plate and it gets very hot and the stainless steel pan turns orange and the polishing dirt also turns orange.

point of combusting carbon, or about 1.100°F.

Is my way good or is it not hot enough

 

[glondor]

Good morning BR007. I should rephrase my statement re: flatpacks. Substitute memory chips? Thought memory chips were flat packs. We are trying 4 different types of material as an experiment. If all goes well with this I will try a small lot of boards and see how it goes. I would love to go "balls to the wall" with this but will take it slow as I don't want to violate any environmental laws, As I as well as the operator have no prior experience we will take it easy at first. If all is cool then we can expand the envelope to see what his system can handle.

Harold, Thanks for pointing out my omission. While I was writing the post I reminded myself to quantify my temperature and for some reason I did not. I believe it was 4metals that told me 850 was an ideal temp, hot enough to do the job but not so hot as to vaporise any PM's. My error was not including the scale used. Degrees Celsius.

The scale for temperature here in Canada is Celsius. 850 degrees C is 1562 degrees F.

Frank 12 I believe the advise here put forth by Harold is to also play a torch around on the material while heating on your burner. When it is good and hot, use the oxygen (unlit) from your torch and play that around and you will see bright spots as the oxygen completes combustion of the carbon based waste.

 

[Barren Realms 007]

Good morning BR007. I should rephrase my statement re: flatpacks. Substitute memory chips? Thought memory chips were flat packs. We are trying 4 different types of material as an experiment. If all goes well with this I will try a small lot of boards and see how it goes. I would love to go "balls to the wall" with this but will take it slow as I don't want to violate any environmental laws, As I as well as the operator have no prior experience we will take it easy at first. If all is cool then we can expand the envelope to see what his system can handle.

Harold, Thanks for pointing out my omission. While I was writing the post I reminded myself to quantify my temperature and for some reason I did not. I believe it was 4metals that told me 850 was an ideal temp, hot enough to do the job but not so hot as to vaporise any PM's. My error was not including the scale used. Degrees Celsius.

The scale for temperature here in Canada is Celsius. 850 degrees C is 1562 degrees F.

Frank 12 I believe the advise here put forth by Harold is to also play a torch around on the material while heating on your burner. When it is good and hot, use the oxygen (unlit) from your torch and play that around and you will see bright spots as the oxygen completes combustion of the carbon based waste.

Flatpacks are the square fiberglass chips with black ceramic top and gold on one corner, they are found on video cards, mother boards, network cards, satelite and dvr receivers.

 

[shyknee]

glondor
let us know how much he plans on charging per pound and what the minimums are and if it is ok to refer him to us. I would like to use him some day .

 

[glondor]

Well the experiment has begun. I was in error Harold, After meeting with the company, Their incinerator is indeed 850 degrees F. What issues will this cause in further processing? Learning curve steep!

The operator is approaching the project with care and thought to produce a good product for me while protecting his interest in his business. He put forth some good ideas that we may implement if he finds he can successfully incinerate with no negative impact to his operations.

I will meet with him again Monday morning to see the results of the first round of testing. Memory chips are the first in the oven. I think they will have the least impact pollution wise and will be the most value per pound when rendered down.
If anyone has any cautions or suggestions or practical knowledge to share please post or PM me if you can.

 

[Harold_V]

Is my way good or is it not hot enough

So long as carbon is burned off, it's hot enough. I used the same system, although I enhanced heat with my rosebud Hoke torch tip. When oxygen is applied and there are no bright spots in the incinerated waste material, the job is done. The whole idea is to eliminate carbonaceous materials.

Harold

 

[Acid_Bath76]

Is my way good or is it not hot enough

So long as carbon is burned off, it's hot enough. I used the same system, although I enhanced heat with my rosebud Hoke torch tip. When oxygen is applied and there are no bright spots in the incinerated waste material, the job is done. The whole idea is to eliminate carbonaceous materials.

Harold

Harold, what's the benefit of burning in a standard 02 environment versus a very low 02 environment? Doesn't subjecting something to really high temperatures in the absence of/or very little 02 produce charcoal... or something really close to it? If this is the case, why not just go that route and gather the bits of metal from the mulched up "ash/charcoal"?

 

[Harold_V]

Is my way good or is it not hot enough

So long as carbon is burned off, it's hot enough. I used the same system, although I enhanced heat with my rosebud Hoke torch tip. When oxygen is applied and there are no bright spots in the incinerated waste material, the job is done. The whole idea is to eliminate carbonaceous materials.

Harold

Harold, what's the benefit of burning in a standard 02 environment versus a very low 02 environment? Doesn't subjecting something to really high temperatures in the absence of/or very little 02 produce charcoal... or something really close to it? If this is the case, why not just go that route and gather the bits of metal from the mulched up "ash/charcoal"?

I can't speak for you, but I had much better things to do with my time than pick fly specks from pepper. The idea of creating carbon instead of eliminating carbon makes no sense, in particular when you consider that activated carbon has an affinity for gold in solution.

It is my opinion that as long as you relegate yourself to hand picking, you will never produce enough value to make it worth your time. That's the chief reason that people don't process boards. It's not because they don't have value---it's because they must be processed in volume, with little or no manual labor involved. In my opinion, sorting incinerated materials by hand is a losing proposition.

Harold

 

[celticsfan]

I observed an interesting and surprising process when I attempted to see what would happen when I washed my incinerated and crushed IC's in water. Fine powder was floating on top and remained there after stirring. It seems that the powder is hydrophobic or it has a lower specific gravity than water. It also seems to be attracted to itself and binds together. I was able to skim the floating powder with a hand held strainer and as the water run out through the 3/16" holes the powder spanned the holes and did not run through. The more I stirred the mix the more powder would gather on the surface to be skimmed off. I removed most of the powder from the mixture this way and was left with metal and pieces of chips that had not been completely broken up and contained metal.
I have only done this procedure one time but it seems easy enough to repeat and I plan to do that while keeping measurements and more accurate observations. My research said that the specific gravity of the ceramic would be around 2.5 to 3.1 and I was thinking about what would be a good separating liquid so I didn't think it would separate in water. Apparently it does. If someone has more insight into this I would like to hear it.
Take Care,
John

 

[glondor]

Very interesting.

 

[kurt]

Harold you posted the following – “The idea of creating carbon instead of eliminating carbon makes no sense, in particular when you consider that activated carbon has an affinity for gold in solution.”

So what you are saying is that if you don’t get “complete” incineration of the epoxy casing when incinerating flat packs &/or chips – there by ending up with a carbonized material (which will crush down fine enough) & then if you process with AR to dissolve the gold wire & there is epoxy that has only been carbonized in what you are processing – value is going to be lost in the fact that it will be retained in the carbon, much the same as activated charcoal works to remove chlorine from chlorinated water.

And if that is the case – is there any way of recovering that value once this has occurred. I ask because I still have some material hanging around from some of my very first attempts at trying to recover gold from chips that would fit this case & it would be interesting to see how much value was lost due to such an over site. (if it can still be recovered)

Kurt

 

[butcher]

Carbon in acids will use up your acid making carbonic acid and CO2 gas.
Carbon can precipitate your gold that you thought you held in your leach liquid, you cannot test for it so you have no idea it is still in ash.

Incinerating cherry red hot is not that much of a problem, the air (oxygen) will help to burn off carbon, and lower pollution, completing combustion, instead of producing carbon monoxide you will produce carbon dioxide, and this red heat if kept hot for about an hour can also oxidize metals, assisting you in your separation steps later, and remove acids, or salts of acids from the incinerated materials.

These fumes can be very deadly, fume hood and scrubbing smoke produced, or re-burning the fumes in flue gas chamber and then scrubbing is recommended, you sure do not want to send smoke signals to the EPA saying come to my house and see what you may want to fine me for, or worse jail me for.

You have been given answer of to burn off carbon, and avoid that headache.
Or you could use flux and collector metal and smelt buttons, which cost you more fuel or acids?

as far as separating floating ash, even though gold is very heavy and sinks in a gold pan, remember fine gold floats, especially in that ash, your losses could be high unless you reprocessed the floating ash.

 

[celticsfan]

Thanks Butcher,
It would be a good idea to process some of the discarded ash and test the liquid for gold. However I do not think that any substantial amount of gold wire fragments are passing through because I can't see them reflect on the surface and I didn't find but a few pieces in the ash when I examined it. The amount of time I saved (and the cost of acid not used) will keep me working with this process for the near future.
Take care,
John

 

[Harold_V]

– is there any way of recovering that value once this has occurred.

For those that used carbon in pulp extraction of gold (cyanide), it was acceptable to incinerate the loaded carbon to extract the values, so I'd assume that you could incinerate to eliminate the carbon in this case, which would allow the recovery of any values that may have been absorbed. I'd likely try a small amount first, to make a determination if the process is warranted. It could be that there are no values tied up.

Harold

 

[kurt]

Thanks Harold I will give it a try someday when I have a little free time - more out of cureousity then anything else

Kurt

 

[Geo]

i live in the country and have a burn pit which i use to set up a incineration occasionally.i use wood pallets as fuel with a steel frame to suspend a metal five gallon bucket on.i incinerate about 10 pounds of ICB's at a time, some have gold legs and some dont.not the same as a flatpack and not as large as the ceramics but still holding plenty of gold.i incinerate long enough to bake the oils out of the plastics and then use a homemade mortar and pestle to pulverize.i don't want to grind or turn into a powder because i use a gold pan to seperate the carbon from the metal.

 

[Harold_V]

i live in the country and have a burn pit which i use to set up a incineration occasionally.i use wood pallets as fuel with a steel frame to suspend a metal five gallon bucket on.i incinerate about 10 pounds of ICB's at a time, some have gold legs and some dont.not the same as a flatpack and not as large as the ceramics but still holding plenty of gold.i incinerate long enough to bake the oils out of the plastics and then use a homemade mortar and pestle to pulverize.i don't want to grind or turn into a powder because i use a gold pan to seperate the carbon from the metal.

It is my opinion that you are likely losing values. When you incinerate, there's no reason for some of the gold to not shed from the plated surfaces. How much might be the question.

It is for the above reason that ash is processed, along with the solids when material is incinerated, as both typically contain values. Thus, I highly recommend all carbon be eliminated in the incineration process. That's really the easy part in that the oil has long since been burned off, so there's little contamination liberated with the process.

Harold