Nickel silfide fire assay

[Hurc]

Hi
Can we use Nickel metal instead of Nickel Oxide for Nickel sulfide Fire Assay?
Thanks

 

[Platz]

No it does not work if you use metallic nickel. It must be nickel oxide to form nickel sulfide in situ. The button at the end is actually nickel sulphide and occluded pgm sulphides it is not a pgm metallic nickel alloy.

 

[samuel-a]

No it does not work if you use metallic nickel. It must be nickel oxide to form nickel sulfide in situ. The button at the end is actually nickel sulphide and occluded pgm sulphides it is not a pgm metallic nickel alloy.

Yes, you actually can use Ni metal.
Though, preferably in powder form.

 

[Platz]

Its never worked a
well compared to nickel oxide for me and I'm not aware of a major assay lab which uses nickel powder unless they can't get hold of nickel oxide. Its probablly due to the fineness of nickel oxide 120 mesh or smaller wheras nickel powder is usually 60 mesh. It seems to stick to the slag and possibly alloys the pgm causing losses to the slag.

 

[Lou]

You can use Ni metal. They sell the atomized powder. They both work, just adjust the S up for NiO

 

[orvi]

Nickel oxide shouldn´t be that hard to obtain, at least you can get nickel carbonate. That could be thermally decomposed to oxide if needed. Relatively low decomposition temperature could probably prevent caking - but I never measured the fineness of the yielded NiO, tho I did this few times for lab purposes. It was powdery, if the carbonate itself was finely divided powder.