Pulverized unpopulated circuit boards with shaker table

[Barren Realms 007]

You can use this as a reference.

Small socket MB 3,790 lbs.
Gold 4.4 Toz
Silver 9.4 Toz
Palladium 2.5 Toz
Platinum 1.3 Toz
Copper 523 Lbs.

were these Pentium 4 (socket 478) boards ?

i have seen 18,000 lbs of mixed hi grade computer boards & cards go to the smelter many times & was told they have zero platinum content.

included in load:
telecom boards
server boards & back panes
medical & scientific PCB
all types of computer mother boards from 1980's, 1990's, 2000's and 2010 ++
and all types of ad-ons for above boards

They were all green small socket mother boards.

 

[eastky]

Kevin most people are reading your results totally wrong..
If bag one was the best using your figures as from 9 kilos then to actually get that result you need 168.5 tons of material to recreate that result for a ton of material.... That is really a poor result it represents a return of 1.12 ozs a ton, not even worth processing!

I posted on the second page that he needed 165 metric ton.

I'm glad to see my figures aren't too far off, but I hesitate to see any change of attitude from Kevin, there is no simple cheap way to refine this material to get all the values, if there was the big boys would be using it. I love to see people try new ways but accept defeat when it s totally obvious.
Eastky we have these discussions often on Kevin's posts but we are wasting our time as he seems blind to the reality of the situation and just keeps going until he can't go any further, I wish he could find a way to profit from this stuff but trying to do it yourself is a total waste of time and money.

Believe me I have read all Kevin's post. He runs wide open then hits a wall and goes on to something else. I posted a lot of numbers in my post and may have got some of them jumbled up and hard to understand.

I used numbers he posted from the assay and worked with what he posted. Math doesn't lie unless you want it to.

 

[Platdigger]

"They were all green small socket mother boards."

Barren, that seems low. I recently sold small socket boards for either 2.40 or 2.60 per pound.
I am pretty sure they, (the buyers) are not in it just to break even or worse.

 

[Barren Realms 007]

"They were all green small socket mother boards."

Barren, that seems low. I recently sold small socket boards for either 2.40 or 2.60 per pound.
I am pretty sure they, (the buyers) are not in it just to break even or worse.

It was a load a friend of mine had processed by someone.

 

[necromancer]

"They were all green small socket mother boards."

Barren, that seems low. I recently sold small socket boards for either 2.40 or 2.60 per pound.
I am pretty sure they, (the buyers) are not in it just to break even or worse.

It was a load a friend of mine had processed by someone.

was the "someone" one of the large smelters ? was that a assay before sending it out ?

 

[Barren Realms 007]

"They were all green small socket mother boards."

Barren, that seems low. I recently sold small socket boards for either 2.40 or 2.60 per pound.
I am pretty sure they, (the buyers) are not in it just to break even or worse.

It was a load a friend of mine had processed by someone.

was the "someone" one of the large smelters ? was that a assay before sending it out ?

As far as I know it was not one of the large smelters. That was not the assay numbers that was the actual return of what was recovered.

 

[necromancer]

thank you.

 

[kjavanb123]

All,

Let me make myself clear, I randomly selected boards as you see from photos, pulverized them, screen the materials to minus mesh 30. Sent that to Steve in MBMMlLC, they ran it on their shaker table video taped it, send me the link and in order to find out how well or efficent their table has been we sent out the discharged materials to an assay lab, and according to th assay results most of metals are concentrated specially for gold 95% of it went to hole 1. In no way we had plan to use this test to assay the metal contents per ton of circuit boards, as again our objection was how well or worse a table can be used to concentrate gold and separate junk from metals.

So I guess this whole discussion about what boards have how much gold is irrelavent to my post here.

Thanks
Kj

 

[necromancer]

if you plan on using the shaker table at your shop will you remove the ""aluminum electrolytic capacitors"" first (before milling)

there is lots of nasty stuff in them & will help you with lower waste costs, seeing that it will all be mixed in with the water.

great post, to bad it went sideways for a bit. 95% recovery rate is very good if it can be done "in house"

 

[nickvc]

Kevin no disrespect but you recovered 95% of the gold only from the sample material in hole one but what is is left in the rest of the boards? The only way to confirm your recovery rate by the table is to get an assay on the remaining balance, the 8 kilos plus that was discarded.
I like your determination but you need to focus on the details to get to the right results.

 

[kjavanb123]

Necromancer,

If I was going to remove the aluminum electrolyt capacitors from large lot of boards, it would not be feasible, the reason I chose to try shaker table was to avoid manual labor and increase the production. The new modification to my mill would eliminate any particles to be airborne, as the feeder will be a closed cyclone, and the discharge will be connected to a bag to contain all the minus 30 mesh size materials.
Plus shaker table has the recirculating pump that the same water can be recycled and used for shaker table. But I will test the water later for any contaminations later try runs.

Nickvc,
The operator of table was not sure about the weight of materials they ran, they estimate to be 10lbs, hole 4 or content of bag 4 is what was the majority of plastic, resins, fiberglass, hole 1 or bag 1 contained all the concentrates with highest specific density materials, I just calculated the numbers of gold for each bag to get the recovery percentage of 95%.
The volume of tailing was a lot, so shaker table operator sampled small amount from it, that was fire assayed by lab, and shows almost 1% of gold went there.

Regards
Kevin

 

[Anonymous]

Kevin how can you quantify anything at all when your operators are even guessing? I really don't see the commercial sense in any of this. It's an utter waste of time and money and as others have pointed out (and you've ignored) it gives out confusing messages about yields.

Answer me a question please. How do you see yourself making more money by adding all these steps into a process over trading on the raw product?

Jon

 

[alexxx]

Kevin,

I love your posts, and your determination too.

But as for this test to be conclusive, you need to start over I believe... Too many numbers missing. This whole thing can't make sense, you need your exact weights & exact assays.

You will need to :

1- Get your dry weight before shredding
2- Dry weight after shredding
3- Assay your pulverized material before running it on the table
4- Weight all your 3 dried cuts after running the material into the table
5- Assay the 3 separate cuts

Only then, you will be able to have a clear picture of the recovery ratio and the material value.

Make sure your sampling is homogeneous, otherwise your assays are going to be wrong as well.

I also believe this material must be incinerated prior to running it on the table, as lots of PMs are still trapped into your coarse & fine fractions.
Size reduction is a must. Everything bigger than 120 mesh is a waste of time with shaking tables processing electronic scrap. This is not alluvial gold that you are running.
What you are after really is the micro gold, 200-400 mesh (this table is suppost to be able to get the fine particles up to 400 mesh).

best of luck.

Alex

 

[solar_plasma]

http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/wtert/sofos/Namias_Thesis_07-08-13.pdf

This is from 2013. Read from p.32 to the end.

Shredding and grinding can result in the loss of up to 40% of precious metals.

On the other side you could get some good hints there. Why reinventing processes that are known to have great disadvantages and have been changed by everyone but the three big copper smelters, which also seems to be a question of time, - at least for material with over 200 ppm gold.

Desoldering and separation is the way to go for high grade material in medium and big style. If you want to stay small, there is no shortcut to the methods described in the forum.

I always loved to read your experiments and I understand you're a hands-on type fellow, but you could save yourself a lot of time reading the existing studies. And maybe then you could find a method that works for you, instead of only seeing what you want to see.

 

[solar_plasma]

By the way, even Umicore is not shredding before processing by smelting. Why?

 

[kjavanb123]

Jon,

I know the weight of pulverized boards that passed mesh 30, before I sent it out to Steve, so that is known, and he said they ran the -30 mesh materials. As for economics of this project, the primary testing shows a good recovery rate for metals of interest, the purpose of this test was not to determine the gold per ton of pulverized boards, but how well the shaker table worked.
There are two main reasons for me not trading the raw materials, first, I am a contractor for municple office here locally which according to our contract trading raw materials (boards) are not permitted, secondly, with the prices of boards that are being traded or exported to overseas smelters leave almost 0 dollars as margin for any profit.
I will send them second batch of 20lbs of boards to run on their smaller table, this time with a lot more accuracy.

Alex,

Thanks for your encouragement. Well noted on your steps, as this time those are steps Steve from MBMMLLC and I will be taking with this batch. As far as size reduction, I screened the materials from the mill, into materails passing mesh 30 but stay on top of mesh 200, and materials that pass mesh 200, on this trial, I am going to record the percentage of each partion. Sampling was done in lab on bags containing all materials. If not mistaken gold bonding wires are 50 mesh size, so anything pass mesh 30 should contain gold bonding wires as it can be seen at the end of video.
Incineration route is not for me, as the equipments, filter are costly, plus after incinerqtion, everything is melted, then elecrolysis with lots of contamination, is just a haunting task for me, using shaker table, decreases the volume of metals to deal with, hence less chemical needed to separate metals on concentrates rather than the entire load of boards, plus this method has very small enviromental impact.

Regards,
Kevin

 

[Anonymous]

Kevin thanks for the information I appreciate that.

Hopefully now we can help! So you get the raw product, what exactly are you allowed to do with it, and what is currently done with it?

 

[goldsilverpro]

I read the whole thing and watched the videos. It looks and sounds feasible to me. Good luck on the next results.

 

[necromancer]

I read the whole thing and watched the videos. It looks and sounds feasible to me. Good luck on the next results.

me too, i have enjoyed this thread.

i truly have concerns towards the aluminum electrolytic capacitors being crushed & put through the shaker table.

how are the costs toward removing them & possibly selling them as scrap, against the costs of disposing 1,000 litres of toxic sludge ?

not saying removing them for reuse, just pop them off.

+ i would think grinding the gold and aluminum together would ad to some losses.

EDIT: grammar and last sentence.

 

[patnor1011]

I read the whole thing and watched the videos. It looks and sounds feasible to me. Good luck on the next results.

me too, i have enjoyed this thread.

i truly have concerns towards the aluminum electrolytic capacitors being crushed & put through the shaker table.

how are the costs toward removing them & possibly selling them as scrap, against the costs of disposing 1,000 litres of toxic sludge ?

not saying removing them for reuse, just pop them off.

+ i would think grinding the gold and aluminum together would ad to some losses.

EDIT: grammar and last sentence.

I would not see it that way. Aluminium electrolytic capacitors do not contain anything horrible. In fact I would see grinding and shaker table as a superb way to separate aluminium from paper/plastic and rubber, much better than incinerating. I once had 5 buckets full of them and was racking my brain how to separate metal from junk fastest way.

Quote from wiki:

Electrolyte[edit]
The electrolyte is usually boric acid or sodium borate in aqueous solution, together with various sugars or ethylene glycol which are added to slow down evaporation. Getting a suitable balance between chemical stability and low internal electrical resistance is not a simple matter; the exact compositions of high-performance electrolytes are closely guarded trade secrets. It took years of research before reliable devices were developed. The electrolytic solvent has to have high dielectric constant, high dielectric strength, and low resistivity; a solute of ionic conductivity facilitators is mixed within.[27]

Electrolytes may be toxic or corrosive. Working with the electrolyte requires safe working practice and appropriate protective equipment such as gloves and safety glasses. Some very old tantalum electrolytics, often called "Wet-slug", contain corrosive sulfuric acid; however, most of these are no longer in service due to corrosion.

There are three major types of water-based electrolytes for aluminium electrolytic capacitors: standard water-based (with 40-70% water), and those containing ethylene glycol or dipropyl ketone (both with less than 25% water). The water content helps lowering the equivalent series resistance, but can make the capacitor prone to generating gas, especially if the electrolyte formulation is faulty; this is a leading cause of capacitor plague, to which the high water content electrolytes are more susceptible. The lower voltage ratings (thinner oxide layer) and lower operating voltage (slower regeneration of oxide layer) are further aggravating factors.[28]

There are a number of non-aqueous electrolytes, which use only a small amount of water. The electrolytes are generally composed of a weak acid, a salt of weak acid, and a solvent, and optional thickening agent and other additives. The electrolyte is usually soaked into an electrode separator. The weak acids are usually organic acid (glacial acetic acid, lactic acid, propionic acid, butyric acid, crotonic acid, acrylic acid, phenol, cresol, etc.) or boric acid. The salts employed are often ammonium or metal salts of organic acids (ammonium acetate, ammonium citrate, aluminium acetate, calcium lactate, ammonium oxalate, etc.) or weak inorganic acids (sodium perborate, trisodium phosphate, etc.). Solvent-based electrolytes may be based on alkanolamines (monoethanolamine, diethanolamine, triethanolamine,...) or polyols (diethylene glycol, glycerol, etc.).[29]