Need help with incineration

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pdamiant

Member
Joined
Oct 10, 2021
Messages
12
Hi folks,

I am new to this. I am just starting my first batch of gold filled refining. I have a question about the incineration after the nitric treatment. What temperature do I need for the incineration (I am thinking between 600 and 800 degrees) and what is the best equipment to use for the incineration. If I can get away with just under 600 degrees I can use my BBQ grill. The filet mignons might not be very happy about it, but hey. Gotta do what I gotta do.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. What set-up do you all have for incineration?
 
Whatever you do not use household items in recovery and refining if you want to ever use them again to eat off or prepare food.
Incineration can be done with a butane torch just heat until the metals are a dull red or all fumes have stopped.
 
Dont do it!

The BBQ should be for BBQ only.

Get a cheap corningware pyroceram dish from a local thrift store. A hot plate/burner, and a small torch.

Thats all you need.

If you get lucky at a garage sale, you can get it all for a few dollars. Brand new hot plate for $15 or 20. New MAPP torch and bottle $50. Pyroceram $2 -5 (thrift/second hand store).

The items are an investment. Less in value than a couple grams of gold. ....with them though, you can do oh-so-many things that are of importance in PM recovery and refining.

Those few, cheap, items will help keep your brisket happy, and you alive to make more money. ...and brisket
 
pdamiant said:
A cheap butane torch and the wife's favourite Pyrex dish it is.

Be careful!

First, pyrex is not Corning Ware / pyroceram. Most pyrex can't stand up to the heat of a hot plate, let alone a torch. Most pyrex will shatter / explode.

Second, if I took any of my wife's favorite dishes of any kind, I'd have to sleep in the barn or risk being sewn into the bed while I slept, beaten with a baseball bat, and set on fire. :shock:

Dave
 
Most Corning Ware will not stand up to the hot plate either. Corning Pyrocream will in most cases. As stated earlier, DO NOT USE ANYTHING THAT WILL LATER BE USED IN ANY WAY FOR FOOD PREPARATION. To do so risks death due to chemical or metal salts exposure. If you are unlucky, such exposure will result in slow, perhaps several years slow, painful death as organs first reduce function then slowly shut down. Safety in all aspects of recovery and refining is paramount. Have fun.

Time for more coffee.
 
You folks are brilliant. Thanks.

How do I ascertain if something is Pyroceram. Is it usually written on it? I doubt I will find one still in its box at a yard sale.
 
UPDATE.....

I just went to Walmart and looked at their Corningware. It said no flame no broiler in the bottom. What about a frying pan? They sit on naked flames all day long.
 
pdamiant said:
UPDATE.....

I just went to Walmart and looked at their Corningware. It said no flame no broiler in the bottom. What about a frying pan? They sit on naked flames all day long.
No, to the frying pan. It will eventually get gobbled up by the volatiles you are roasting off. Which will just end up making your job more difficult in the end. ...however, i cant speak on those new "ceramic" frying pans that are tan or green. It would be far cheaper to just find some real-deal pyroceram. If you cant find any. Pm me, I will send you some. Gratis.

Its got to be second hand corningware.
They do not sell corningware pyroceram anymore. Its some cheapo knockoff crap that simply wont do. There are a couple corningware threads on the forum. Jim posted a link to one. Another is one of my first forum posts. Corningware411 dot com is a great site as well.

FrugalRefiner said:
Second, if I took any of my wife's favorite dishes of any kind, I'd have to sleep in the barn or risk being sewn into the bed while I slept, beaten with a baseball bat, and set on fire. :shock:

Dave

Geez. I wish my old oldlady wouldve cared that much about anything, let alone cooking stuff. ...but, she couldnt even boil water. :)
 
I used a stainless steel pan until....

DSC_7518.JPG

If you are only incinerating plastic chips, jewellery or other dry stuff it holds up quite good. Just check the bottom before usage.

When incinerating stuff that has chloride salts in it the metal is eaten away quite fast. The pot I used was killed by incinerating filters with a lot of solid stuff in them. A lot of tin and lead chlorides and other stuff. The salts melted at first and then made a nice hole in the bottom while smoking a lot. The incineration worked, but there was a small powder pile under the pan when I took it out of my oven.

Now I have a stainless frying pan that I'm planning to use for incineration and a stainless pot I so far has used for incinerating silver mylars from keyboards. It has been working just fine so far.

Göran
 
Can anyone provide a link to a good, efficient homemade incinerator (for efficient burning of 1-3 kg chips at a time) with a schematic or decent sketch of design, including materials used? Would no doubt be with steel, firebrick, and mineral wool, with afterburner welded in place. I’ve read dozens of threads here and combed the library, and know what’s needed, but can’t find a decent drawing with specs that I or a contractor could use.
 
Can anyone provide a link to a good, efficient homemade incinerator (for efficient burning of 1-3 kg chips at a time) with a schematic or decent sketch of design, including materials used? Would no doubt be with steel, firebrick, and mineral wool, with afterburner welded in place. I’ve read dozens of threads here and combed the library, and know what’s needed, but can’t find a decent drawing with specs that I or a contractor could use.
This is double posting, you should have deleted the other first, I’ll do it now.

There are plenty sketches, but not full drawings since people fabricate it with what they have at hand.
 
Can anyone provide a link to a good, efficient homemade incinerator (for efficient burning of 1-3 kg chips at a time) with a schematic or decent sketch of design, including materials used? Would no doubt be with steel, firebrick, and mineral wool, with afterburner welded in place. I’ve read dozens of threads here and combed the library, and know what’s needed, but can’t find a decent drawing with specs that I or a contractor could use.
Find yourself steel drum of suitable size. For 3kg batch, maybe like 50 L one would be just fine. Insulate whole drum with mineral wool, at least 2-3cm thick. 15cm from the bottom, support some stainless steel perforated plate, on which you evenly spread the chips. From the bottom, and top of the chips layer, bore two holes for hot air inlet. And use heatgun instead of burner as principal source of heat. One that has temperature regulation, which is nice to have when incineration kicks in at full throttle - you does not want to heat it even more at that point :)
Afterburner is simply put on top of the main drum. Use some old paint can (taller the better), also insulated from the inside with mineral wool and stick small propane torch into the hole you make from the side.

Using steel drums is very easy as they are easily sourced, cheap and expendable :) But insulation make the steel last much much longer and also help with higher burning temperature - which assure complete burning. Afterburner is many times only needed for the onset of the pyrolysis/incineration, when insides of main furnance/drum aren´t hot enough to support complete burning. Also, it is sometimes needed to ignite hot material inside, as not all heatguns can go to more than 650°C - which is from my experience the temperature needed to ignite the outcoming flammable gasses.
 
Can anyone provide a link to a good, efficient homemade incinerator (for efficient burning of 1-3 kg chips at a time) with a schematic or decent sketch of design, including materials used? Would no doubt be with steel, firebrick, and mineral wool, with afterburner welded in place. I’ve read dozens of threads here and combed the library, and know what’s needed, but can’t find a decent drawing with specs that I or a contractor could use.
Uni-Cast 2800 Castable Refractory, soundingstone.com
 
Thanks Kurt, Orvi, stoneware and Yggdrasil. I’m sourcing materials now. Considering a 200L drum instead of 50L; is that too large, or could the larger one handle, say, 5-10 kg of chips at a time? I assume you weld the upper stage to the lower one, or will high temp mortar work?
How far up in the upper chamber should the air be injected?
Several posters mention using 650C heat guns instead of propane fired burners. Any opinions on this? Wouldn’t a heat gun incinerate right away (because of the air) rather than pyrolyse in the lower stage, which is what we’re trying to achieve down there—pyrolysis?
 
Pyrolysis of biomass, basically your building a gas generator.

The gas produced on this reactor is used as motor fuel, in your scenario just burn the gas produced at the stack.

Stainless steel wool maybe used for your flash arrestor on the gas output side.
 

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Thanks Kurt, Orvi, stoneware and Yggdrasil. I’m sourcing materials now. Considering a 200L drum instead of 50L; is that too large, or could the larger one handle, say, 5-10 kg of chips at a time? I assume you weld the upper stage to the lower one, or will high temp mortar work?
How far up in the upper chamber should the air be injected?
Several posters mention using 650C heat guns instead of propane fired burners. Any opinions on this? Wouldn’t a heat gun incinerate right away (because of the air) rather than pyrolyse in the lower stage, which is what we’re trying to achieve down there—pyrolysis?
Yeah, it will pyrolyse and incinerate from the start. And there is nothing bad about it, you just need to know it and adjust for it. It depends greatly on what is your end goal. With pyrolysis, you need to burn the outgas anyway... So in my opinion, direct incineration with plenty of air present is beneficial, as you use the combustion heat to get to right temperature. From my experience, you use full throttle on the heatgun just from the start, then you switch to low heat, and then just air for the last stage. Very little external heat required.

And if the carbon isn´t a problem for your further operation, just stop at the point where material stops emmiting gaseous pyrolysis products and just carbonaceous material is left. When you switch down the airflow and heat, it will slowly cool itself and burning of carbon dies down.

With larger drum/vessel, you need bigger heating capacity to onset the pyrolysis and incineration. So 2-3kW heatgun would be probably less efficient. But as the material start to burn (firstly in the place where is the input of the hot air, then it spreads to the whole layer) it will self-suffice the heat required. Unfortunately, for this stage, you need that afterburner going on full throttle from the start of operation, as temperature in main chamber isn´t yet high enough to support clean burning, and lots of unburnt gasses are emitted and need to be burned in upper stage.

As to the air injected to the afterburner, it should be injected as early as possible, because you need longest time possible to achieve full combustion of volatiles to CO2 and water. Air pump for inflating matresses for example is very good for this task, but only if it is paired with some PWM regulator or regulated power supply, so you does not need to run it on full power. Or optionally, you can make some "valve", by sticking the piece of sheet metal inside the tube, where cut is made for it´s insertion. And by adjusting the slit, you can regulate the air volume passed in. These "valves" I also recommend to use in the main drum on the input of hot air from heatgun - much better regulation than just two stages which typical heatgun offers. You observe the whole operation, and if you see smoke from the chimney, you crank the afterburner torch and air to max, and heat from the bottom slightly down to maintain it, and so on and so on :)

Main chamber and afterburner - i personally taken the lid from the main drum, cut a proper sized hole in it, and insulated the lid from the inner side with wool. To the bottom part of afterburner is cut hole of same diameter, and after insulating it with wool, these two stages are just put one on another, no need for sealing it in my opinion. Hot air want to move upwards and that "chimney effect" will effectively drag the air in from places where sealing isn´t perfect.
 
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