solar_plasma
Well-known member
all iodine can be recycled
But that may be as easy as read, if you use only iodine. Then it's slow and weak because of the little amount of iodine that is soluble in water.
Williams method to get iodine back from iodide didn't work in my experiments, it stayed dissolved, didn't want to precipitate. Still searching the texts where I got something wrong.
To get the iodine out of the iodine/iodide by widely known methods will be much work. Traditionally it must be extracted from the brown solution with some non-polar dissolver, which then must be destilled off.....possible, but not really economic.
AND iodine/iodide obviously likes nickel I used 600ml iodine/iodide on 600g 50%-plated pins (not rinsed of solder - big mistake!), the gold is not complety gone, there is yellow-white pricipitate and DMG seems to be positive on nickel (pink precipitate, but I didnt use NH4OH! :shock: ). DMG is negative on palladium.
Now I will run the batch with the good old sulfuric cell, which works fine for me.
Still, I will store iodine-leaching in my repertoire for two cases:
a) as a school experiment with pure gold on unused diabetic strips or gold leaves
b) for full-platings with plastics that can't/must not be removed as for some kind of transistors (don't open or smash them them: As, BeO) as long as I don't dare cyanide-leaching
Edit: Forget "b)"! And cyanide has to be treated by professionals with professional equipment and sealed systems. What is left over is, that I think iodine etching is interesting, but no alternative to the common methods of small quantity recovery.
I hope this helps others.