Hi, and warm greetings,
Here's my question about Parkes: is it used to recover PGMs as well as Ag and Au? It's been touched on by several people at this site. The explanation I'm usually given goes something like this: "Ag is on the order of a 1000 times more soluble in Zn than in Pb, so melting Zn in molten Pb, and then floating off the Zn containing the Ag, letting it cool, and then skimming it off, is a way of removing it". Ditto for the Au, only it's probably less 'alloyable' in the Zn, so may require several treatments to recover values. No doubt every metal has it's own relative affinity for other molten metals, complicated by orders of magnitude when several metals are involved in an alloy.
Somewhere I thought I read that big operators in the western U.S. use molten Pb to recover PGMs from crushed catalytic converters.
In any case, I'm grateful for the experienced individuals on the forum.
Sam
Michigan, USA
P.S.
and a promotion for glycerol as a cheap source of smelting fuel, if you can find someone who runs a biodiesel operation. I was lucky to find a bunch of people in the area who gladly gave me lots. Of course, it requires filtering and 'thinning' to flow through the fuel lines in cold weather. But cheap. And hot.
Here's my question about Parkes: is it used to recover PGMs as well as Ag and Au? It's been touched on by several people at this site. The explanation I'm usually given goes something like this: "Ag is on the order of a 1000 times more soluble in Zn than in Pb, so melting Zn in molten Pb, and then floating off the Zn containing the Ag, letting it cool, and then skimming it off, is a way of removing it". Ditto for the Au, only it's probably less 'alloyable' in the Zn, so may require several treatments to recover values. No doubt every metal has it's own relative affinity for other molten metals, complicated by orders of magnitude when several metals are involved in an alloy.
Somewhere I thought I read that big operators in the western U.S. use molten Pb to recover PGMs from crushed catalytic converters.
In any case, I'm grateful for the experienced individuals on the forum.
Sam
Michigan, USA
P.S.
and a promotion for glycerol as a cheap source of smelting fuel, if you can find someone who runs a biodiesel operation. I was lucky to find a bunch of people in the area who gladly gave me lots. Of course, it requires filtering and 'thinning' to flow through the fuel lines in cold weather. But cheap. And hot.
