vegaswinner
Well-known member
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2011
- Messages
- 93
I recently recovered from a large batch of pentium ceramics using AP, rinsed with HCL, dissolved all foils using hcl-cl, filtered into beakers then let them sit for a couple of days to dissipate the chlorine. All was looking good, 3 large beakers full of concentrated, crystal clear AUCL3.
Here's where the strange things started to happen. I poured half of one of the beakers into another vessel in order to dilute in preparation of the addition of SMB, almost immediately the AUCL3 became very cloudy. I re filtered expecting to catch a lot of insoluble salts but nothing, just a cloudy solution. Re tested with stannous, positive for gold. I let this sit to see if anything settled but it didn't so I moved onto SMB. Solution precipitated ok, i was left with a still cloudy but now negative for gold spent solution. What is causing it to cloud up?
Moved onto next beaker, same thing happened.
While I was doing beaker 2 and due to my impatience and a lack of beakers I tried as an experiment just dropping smb directly into the last concentrated beaker. Apart from some initial fizzing nothing happened. The following day it looked like the SMB had settled to the bottom of the beaker. I siphoned of the spent solutions and then refiltered beaker 3 into 2 separate beakers, straight away I noticed purple stains appear on the edges of the filter paper. I guessed this was colloidal gold precipitated by the earlier addition of smb, so as not to lose this gold I strained out the filter paper and dropped it on top of the rest of my papers and swabs. I re tested the solution with stannous, positive and dropped this swab in with the rest. This is when I noticed orange appear on the filter paper, it only stayed orange for a second then turned purple. I put a drop of stannous on the filter paper and again it immediately went orange, then purple. Is this platinum in the solution/ceramics or some other false positive test? I know hcl-cl can put platinum into solution. If so, whats the best way to deal with it as I'm not yet familiar with pgm's? Drop the gold with smb then cement out everything else with copper and save whatever powders for another day?
Here's where the strange things started to happen. I poured half of one of the beakers into another vessel in order to dilute in preparation of the addition of SMB, almost immediately the AUCL3 became very cloudy. I re filtered expecting to catch a lot of insoluble salts but nothing, just a cloudy solution. Re tested with stannous, positive for gold. I let this sit to see if anything settled but it didn't so I moved onto SMB. Solution precipitated ok, i was left with a still cloudy but now negative for gold spent solution. What is causing it to cloud up?
Moved onto next beaker, same thing happened.
While I was doing beaker 2 and due to my impatience and a lack of beakers I tried as an experiment just dropping smb directly into the last concentrated beaker. Apart from some initial fizzing nothing happened. The following day it looked like the SMB had settled to the bottom of the beaker. I siphoned of the spent solutions and then refiltered beaker 3 into 2 separate beakers, straight away I noticed purple stains appear on the edges of the filter paper. I guessed this was colloidal gold precipitated by the earlier addition of smb, so as not to lose this gold I strained out the filter paper and dropped it on top of the rest of my papers and swabs. I re tested the solution with stannous, positive and dropped this swab in with the rest. This is when I noticed orange appear on the filter paper, it only stayed orange for a second then turned purple. I put a drop of stannous on the filter paper and again it immediately went orange, then purple. Is this platinum in the solution/ceramics or some other false positive test? I know hcl-cl can put platinum into solution. If so, whats the best way to deal with it as I'm not yet familiar with pgm's? Drop the gold with smb then cement out everything else with copper and save whatever powders for another day?
