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nic_v21

New member
Joined
Jan 9, 2018
Messages
3
Does anyone have direct experience with using Resin balls to selectively extract gold and silver from a Leach solution. I am particularly interested in using a chloride leach. I had sent IXOS from Sixth wave tech a sample of my ore last year and they crashed and burned! Seems they cannot do it with a chloride only cyanide solution.
 
Not sure what you are dealing with or plan on using?

Carbon, resins, or several of the other methods used on the alkaline-based leaches like cyanide does not work the same as with acidic chloride solutions, although carbon would absorb gold (it would also become volatile as a carbon gold chloride soaked form making it easy to some gold up in smoke in later procedures, carbon or resins would be a very poor choice for recovering gold from acidic chloride solutions.


You will not have silver dissolved in the same chloride solution that gold is dissolved in.

Silver chloride AgCl is pretty much insoluble as a chloride salt, even in acids. it will show up as a white powder, and a very small or minute amount of silver will oxidize to a higher oxidation state in a highly concentrated solution of chloride ions as AgCl2, only enough to have to deal with later, after recovery in the refining stages of the gold.

If you dissolved gold in a chloride solution you had to have used an acid and an oxidizer, to get the gold to go into the solution, you do not give enough information to answer your question on specifics...

You will need to remove any remaining or overuse of the oxidizer you may have used before the gold can be precipitated as gold powder.

For example, if nitric, is used as the oxidizing agent to remove the free nitric acid, nitrate salts, or nitrous acid, or to denox the solution we can use one or a combination or all of these methods:
Evaporation ( not boiling, using a lower heat, (a good temperature is using steam heat, done on steam baths or steam-heated radiators by some of the older refiners or chemists, to keep the heat in a good temperature range).
Adding several drops of H2SO4, the little bit of sulfuric acid used here has three main purposes, besides making the solution more acidic than the other acids used.
The sulfuric helps to drive off the more volatile acids and their salts, can provide some sulfate ions which can help to precipitate troublesome lead as PbSO4, and the H2SO4 will also help ensure you do not cook your gold solution dry, by mistake, driving off all acid and then volatilizing chloride salts (any base metals at this point convert base metal chloride salt to sulfates, which are much harder to fuse or to become volatile as fumes), (sulfuric also has a very high boiling point compared to the other acids, making it harder to drive off or cook its salts dry or drive it off as vapors in a fusion of dry salts, H2SO4 helps to keep you from vaporizing some of your gold up in smoke by mistake.
Bringing the solution to a very concentrated almost to the syrup consistency, adding a little HCl acid, to remove some nitric as the red deadly cloud, and also the deadly invisible Nitrate gases, and NOx gases, we repeat this evaporation and acid addition process 3 times, to remove the oxidizer and its salts (which can reform nitric with and hydronium or acid additions).
we can also add gold and heat, which will also remove the oxidizer.
As well as using sulfamic acid, to remove nitric (also providing some sulfuric as well as sulfate in situ.
You can use one or more. I use all three methods in combination together at times.

Now you can use a reagent of your choice to precipitate the gold as metal powder or mud:

iron sulfate, called copperas, green vitriol, which can be bought or made on-site, using very dilute 10% H2SO4 and clean soft iron (purer iron like from a motor or transformer the laminated iron cores).

Sulfites, like sodium sulfite (not sulfate is a completely different chemical or animal of the same cousin), sodium or other metal sulfite, sulfites like sodium metabisulfite often referred to as SMB, there are many other reagents you can use.

For dirty solutions, High in oxidizer, or base metals, using copper as a reagent to precipitate gold as metal powders is an excellent choice, it is fairly selective for gold compared to the other base metals, leaving the less precious metals in solution, the process putting copper into solution in a chemical displacement reaction, where metals trade places... Study the reactivity series of metals to get an understanding.

Without knowing what you have or have done to get here, and without knowing any details it is hard to answer your question.

please tell us how your truck broke down, what noises did it make, and any smoke, fumes, or fire. describe any flat tires, the more details you give the better we can understand not only your problem but also your question, that way maybe we can answer questions better and possibly back on the road faster...


Welcome to the forum I suggest you study Miss C.M. Hoke's book, it is priceless when it comes to learning about recovery and refining gold. Her book can be found all over the forum in threads and in several members' signature lines at the bottom of their posts...

Dealing with waste and studying the safety section of the forum as well as following up on the subject on your own from other sources, can save your health and your life as well as help to keep you from poisoning those who live near you such as family and neighbors, or from poisoning those who live miles and miles from you.
 
Last edited:
Not sure what you are dealing with or plan on using?

Carbon, resins, or several of the other methods used on the alkaline-based leaches like cyanide does not work the same as with acidic chloride solutions, although carbon would absorb gold (it would also become volatile as a carbon gold chloride soaked form making it easy to some gold up in smoke in later procedures, carbon or resins would be a very poor choice for recovering gold from acidic chloride solutions.


You will not have silver dissolved in the same chloride solution that gold is dissolved in.

Silver chloride AgCl is pretty much insoluble as a chloride salt, even in acids. it will show up as a white powder, and a very small or minute amount of silver will oxidize to a higher oxidation state in a highly concentrated solution of chloride ions as AgCl2, only enough to have to deal with later, after recovery in the refining stages of the gold.

If you dissolved gold in a chloride solution you had to have used an acid and an oxidizer, to get the gold to go into the solution, you do not give enough information to answer your question on specifics...

You will need to remove any remaining or overuse of the oxidizer you may have used before the gold can be precipitated as gold powder.

For example, if nitric, is used as the oxidizing agent to remove the free nitric acid, nitrate salts, or nitrous acid, or to denox the solution we can use one or a combination or all of these methods:
Evaporation ( not boiling, using a lower heat, (a good temperature is using steam heat, done on steam baths or steam-heated radiators by some of the older refiners or chemists, to keep the heat in a good temperature range).
Adding several drops of H2SO4, the little bit of sulfuric acid used here has three main purposes, besides making the solution more acidic than the other acids used.
The sulfuric helps to drive off the more volatile acids and their salts, can provide some sulfate ions which can help to precipitate troublesome lead as PbSO4, and the H2SO4 will also help ensure you do not cook your gold solution dry, by mistake, driving off all acid and then volatilizing chloride salts (any base metals at this point convert base metal chloride salt to sulfates, which are much harder to fuse or to become volatile as fumes), (sulfuric also has a very high boiling point compared to the other acids, making it harder to drive off or cook its salts dry or drive it off as vapors in a fusion of dry salts, H2SO4 helps to keep you from vaporizing some of your gold up in smoke by mistake.
Bringing the solution to a very concentrated almost to the syrup consistency, adding a little HCl acid, to remove some nitric as the red deadly cloud, and also the deadly invisible Nitrate gases, and NOx gases, we repeat this evaporation and acid addition process 3 times, to remove the oxidizer and its salts (which can reform nitric with and hydronium or acid additions).
we can also add gold and heat, which will also remove the oxidizer.
As well as using sulfamic acid, to remove nitric (also providing some sulfuric as well as sulfate in situ.
You can use one or more. I use all three methods in combination together at times.

Now you can use a reagent of your choice to precipitate the gold as metal powder or mud:

iron sulfate, called copperas, green vitriol, which can be bought or made on-site, using very dilute 10% H2SO4 and clean soft iron (purer iron like from a motor or transformer the laminated iron cores).

Sulfites, like sodium sulfite (not sulfate is a completely different chemical or animal of the same cousin), sodium or other metal sulfite, sulfites like sodium metabisulfite often referred to as SMB, there are many other reagents you can use.

For dirty solutions, High in oxidizer, or base metals, using copper as a reagent to precipitate gold as metal powders is an excellent choice, it is fairly selective for gold compared to the other base metals, leaving the less precious metals in solution, the process putting copper into solution in a chemical displacement reaction, where metals trade places... Study the reactivity series of metals to get an understanding.

Without knowing what you have or have done to get here, and without knowing any details it is hard to answer your question.

please tell us how your truck broke down, what noises did it make, and any smoke, fumes, or fire. describe any flat tires, the more details you give the better we can understand not only your problem but also your question, that way maybe we can answer questions better and possibly back on the road faster...


Welcome to the forum I suggest you study Miss C.M. Hoke's book, it is priceless when it comes to learning about recovery and refining gold. Her book can be found all over the forum in threads and in several members' signature lines at the bottom of their posts...

Dealing with waste and studying the safety section of the forum as well as following up on the subject on your own from other sources, can save your health and your life as well as help to keep you from poisoning those who live near you such as family and neighbors, or from poisoning those who live miles and miles from you.
Thank you for your response, although most of it is way past my expertise, I appreciate the info. I have just ordered Wills Mineral processing Tech, I will read Hoke's book as well. We are dealing with a complex ore, and as we are just about to get started with a conventional mill using crushing, grinding, floatation etc. I wanted to explore newer methodology and one NOT utilizing cyanide. IDK if you are familiar with IXOS Gold Extraction – IXOS Gold Extraction ,this new technology uses resin balls to selectively extract AU/Ag. They primarily use it with cyanide, but we contacted them with the intention to use a Chloride leach. After sending them 100kg of concentrates they titivated with it for over a year and all I could get out of them was "it didn't work". So that's why I'm reaching out to other people.
 
Ion exchange resin beads have charged organic functionalities attached to the outer surface of the beads as well as forming a lining inside pores in the resin.
These charged organic functionalities are what grabs the gold from solution and retains it on and in the beads.
These organic functionalities are also what are preferentially attacked by the oxidant in a chloride leach, they are a much softer target than gold.
The only way you can load gold chloride on to these resins is to get rid of the leach oxidant before trying to load.
Because the gold chloride complexes depend on having an oxidant present to maintain chemical stability, removing the oxidant rapidly leads to loss of gold from solution.
You end up with a choice of oxidising the functionality which holds the gold complexes or going through an oxidant removal step.
Neither of these choices will be worth pursuing, you will lose money at an astonishing rate.
This is why people who wish to run chloride leaches use activated carbon as a gold adsorbent.
Other alternative gold complexants such as bromine and iodine are way too expensive for use on ores despite claims of those pushing those technologies.
Most modern day ores are sulphides and have the gold associated with the sulphide fraction.
If this is the case with your ore then you are looking at a sulfide separation step rather than a gold leaching step, gravity separation and flotation are the usual routes for this.
Deano
 
My question is, does anyone here have actual experience with these beads. My concern is that IXOS uses cyanide.

They state that their IXOS® Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Beads with GlyCat™ is a green alternative.

I personally have no issue with using cyanide or mercury in mining, and have done so in Africa and S America. But here in the US we in mining have to walk a tightrope with the regulatory agencies. And some earth muffin bureaucrat sees "Cyanide." and they go off the deep end.

Forgetting Chloride for a moment, what else could we use with these MIP balls? And is there someone doing it?
 
All ion exchange resins are made with similar structures and functionalities.
They are usually used to recover gold complexes from cyanide solutions for two reasons.
Firstly cyanide solutions use oxygen from the air as their oxidant for leaching gold, this has the least effect on the resin functionalities compared with oxidants used in halide leaches.
This means that you get a much longer functionality life in cyanide leaches than in halide leaches.
Secondly, because cyanide leaching is the industry standard method, resin bead companies are going to make beads for these liquors because the mining companies have already invested in cyanide systems using activated carbon.
The real question is why do mining companies continue to use cyanide leaching rather than less toxic alternatives.
The simple answer is that cyanide is substantially cheaper to use than all alternatives and unless the industry is legislated out of cyanide use it will continue to use cyanide.
If cyanide were banned then the alternatives are acid conditioned leaches which use carbon as the adsorbent or thiosulfate type leaches where the gold complexes do not load well onto any type of adsorbent or high reagent cost glycine type leaches which can load well onto carbon and resin but still have a shortened resin functionality lifespan.
Where do resins have a place in the gold adsorbance system ?
Basically in gold processing systems where the feed stock is fairly clean e-waste or similar.
Despite all the optimistic papers from the resin proponents virtually all commercial mining leach systems use carbon for gold adsorption.
A cheap, low toxicity, precious metal preferential, high loading of complexes on adsorbents precious metal solvent would be instantly embraced by the mining industry but it is not available so cyanide will continue to be the reagent of choice and carbon will be the adsorbent of choice.
Deano
 
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