Question about a process I'm thinking about.

[rewalston]

Hey everyone, I've been out of it for a while (although I do read the emailed digests). I mostly work with electronics. Nitric for me is to cost prohibative to buy or make, so I came up with an idea I wanted to ask about. I know that electronics, pins, foils, wires, etc are mostly copper. I was thinking of taking everything and inquarting it with copper, and then making a strong copper chloride solution with HCl and strong (maybe 12%) H2O2. Then I would take that and use it on my inquarted electronic gold. Question I have, would doing it this way, work similar to using nitric for silver inquartation, or would it instead of creating a honeycomb sponge just give me black gold powder?

Rusty

 

[stoneware]

Your 47 minutes from Alphachem you can pick up from the warehouse and avoid the dangerous goods shipping surcharge.

Four 2.5 liter bottles not that expensive.

ALPHACHEM LIMITED
2485 Milltower Court
Mississauga, Ontario L5N 5Z6
Tel: (905) 821 - 2995
Fax: (905) 821 - 2660

 

[Lino1406]

Acid peroxide, A/P, is discussed in this forum many times. With high peroxide concentration it can dissolve gold. With low concentration it is used alternatively to nitric, depending on raw material considerations

 

[Yggdrasil]

Hey everyone, I've been out of it for a while (although I do read the emailed digests). I mostly work with electronics. Nitric for me is to cost prohibative to buy or make, so I came up with an idea I wanted to ask about. I know that electronics, pins, foils, wires, etc are mostly copper. I was thinking of taking everything and inquarting it with copper, and then making a strong copper chloride solution with HCl and strong (maybe 12%) H2O2. Then I would take that and use it on my inquarted electronic gold. Question I have, would doing it this way, work similar to using nitric for silver inquartation, or would it instead of creating a honeycomb sponge just give me black gold powder?

Rusty

As long as there are no silver it should be ok, but will be very slow.
No need for strong Peroxide the copper chloride together with oxygen is what is doing the job.
If you have some green oxidized copper lying around you don't need peroxide at all.
Just add it to HCl and start bubbling air through it.
But for the use you are planning, I would pour it into shots and flatten them as thin as possible to save time.

And as Lino says, do not use strong Peroxide more than a bottle cap or so.

 

[FrugalRefiner]

Hey everyone, I've been out of it for a while (although I do read the emailed digests). I mostly work with electronics. Nitric for me is to cost prohibative to buy or make, so I came up with an idea I wanted to ask about. I know that electronics, pins, foils, wires, etc are mostly copper. I was thinking of taking everything and inquarting it with copper, and then making a strong copper chloride solution with HCl and strong (maybe 12%) H2O2. Then I would take that and use it on my inquarted electronic gold. Question I have, would doing it this way, work similar to using nitric for silver inquartation, or would it instead of creating a honeycomb sponge just give me black gold powder?

Rusty

I don't see any advantage to inquarting it with copper. As you said, your material is already mostly copper. Just run it through a normal copper chloride leach. It will be slow, but it will eventually digest the base metals. Most of your gold should still remain as foils, but some may end up as mud.

If you simply melt your material, the gold will already be far below one quarter of the metal content, so your gold will be finely divided in the alloy you create, so it will all end up as mud. Adding copper will just dilute the gold further.

Dave

 

[Martijn]

The HCL-H2O2 leach will dissolve everything and will be very expensive. It will dissolve the gold as well. Or you stop with adding H2O2 and you're left with AP. Which is very slow and works better on the electronics as said earlier.
Adding copper to dissolve everything again makes no sense. Not with nitric or anything else.
The 'inquarting' will only help when you go for a copper sulphate cell and may not even be necessary.
Raising the copper content is only needed if the copper content is too low for this process.

Are you talking about burning and smelting the metals out of PCB's with components, pins and wires or just melting stripped bare metals?
Wires will conain no pm's and should be kept out.
Smelting whole boards is a totally different craft. You will have to grind them down to mix with the flux.

If you're going to grind them down anyway:
The most environmentally friendly option is grinding, milling and gravity separation imo.
You can reapeat it on the tailings and have unburned, less pollutive waste.

Then treat the concentrate with acids, e.g AP.

I think the shortcut you're looking for is not a good idea.

Martijn.

 

[Martijn]

To answer your question: no. With inquarting gold with silver you have 25% of the desired metal out of your digestion.
With copper inquarting you will have less than 0.025% of yield. Inquarting means getting down to 6K or 25%.
With your suggested process the leftover gold will likely be purple, tiny, almost colloidal gold particles and could float around for a very long time in solution.

 

[rewalston]

Right now it's not feasible, that and I don't have a vehicle. I was already aware of Alphachem. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Your 47 minutes from Alphachem you can pick up from the warehouse and avoid the dangerous goods shipping surcharge.

Four 2.5 liter bottles not that expensive.

ALPHACHEM LIMITED
2485 Milltower Court
Mississauga, Ontario L5N 5Z6
Tel: (905) 821 - 2995
Fax: (905) 821 - 2660

View attachment 52244

 

[rewalston]

More thank likely there will be a little silver in the mix. I'm working with whole boards using the method that Palladium posted some time back, so I know that there will wind up being some silver chloride. Before I can use his process though, I still have quite a bit of work to do on the boards, still a lot of ferous and aluminum material on them.

As long as there are no silver it should be ok, but will be very slow.
No need for strong Peroxide the copper chloride together with oxygen is what is doing the job.
If you have some green oxidized copper lying around you don't need peroxide at all.
Just add it to HCl and start bubbling air through it.
But for the use you are planning, I would pour it into shots and flatten them as thin as possible to save time.

And as Lino says, do not use strong Peroxide more than a bottle cap or so.

 

[Yggdrasil]

More thank likely there will be a little silver in the mix. I'm working with whole boards using the method that Palladium posted some time back, so I know that there will wind up being some silver chloride. Before I can use his process though, I still have quite a bit of work to do on the boards, still a lot of ferous and aluminum material on them.

Anyway, as said by others do not add copper. There is plenty in the boards themself for that kind of use.
If you add copper it should be to achieve enough purity to run them in a Copper cell.
Then you will get all your values in the slimes.

 

[rewalston]

Thanks everyone

 

[orvi]

Do not melt and dissolve in AP or nitric alone. Content of gold is that small you will produce extremely fine gold particles that you eventually wouldn´t be able to effectively collect by filtration or settling.

Go with AP leach. Search the manual to AP here on the forum. And as sidenote, you do not need the peroxide at all, air will accomplish the kickstart of the reaction too, but it will likely take one extra day of aerating