Question about the gold from a cell

[whitesid]

Assuming I don't care about the purity of the gold, I just want to recover it. Can I just melt down the black mud from the bottom of the sulfuric cell and get an impure gold button?

 

[Harold_V]

Yes, that's possible, but I have a hunch you'd lose a great deal of the values to the flux.

If you desire to not refine, you would be well served to incinerate the material, then give it a hard boil in dilute nitric. Rinse, dry well, then melt. If you can get the material to agglomerate without a heavy flux covering, you likely will lose very little to the flux. If not, you may be able to recover the lost values by using soda ash in conjunction with borax.

Harold