Shifting to pyrometallurgy process

[Ayham Hafez]

I think you may need to hit the metallic ingots with an XRF, to determine what you have. My suspicion is Al. Not really amendable to a Nitric bath, if in large enough quantity.

No its not aluminum, I make sure I removed all aluminum parts, I think its because of silicon, I didn't use any silica, I did another test with adding silica and I got a usual nitric reaction with the metallic shots.

Do you know any cons for using tiny amount of sulphur inside my fluxes recipe to put iron and other base metals in sulphur slags? So I don't need to make magnetic separation?

 

[goldshark]

No its not aluminum, I make sure I removed all aluminum parts, I think its because of silicon, I didn't use any silica, I did another test with adding silica and I got a usual nitric reaction with the metallic shots.

Do you know any cons for using tiny amount of sulphur inside my fluxes recipe to put iron and other base metals in sulphur slags? So I don't need to make magnetic separation?

Not really sure what you mean by "any Cons". Do you mean flux?

 

[Ayham Hafez]

Not really sure what you mean by "any Cons". Do you mean flux?

I mean is it a good idea to use sulphur powder as a flux when smelt E-waste, so we make sure iron and other base metals will be pushed into slags as sulphates, small amount of sulphur to avoid sulphurizing copper.

Cause I noticed if we use nitrates to oxidize base metals we should add big quantities of nitrates which will eat refractories or crucibles quickly, why we need a lot of nitrates? Simply because we will have a lot of carbon inside our pyrolized E-waste which will react with nitrates before iron or other base metals, also sulphur much faster with reaction with iron than oxygen

 

[goldshark]

I am not the authority on smelting. From what I have read and done for assaying, I have never used the addition of Sulphur as a flux, to my assays/smelts. Nor have I ever seen Sulphur as a flux in an assayers book of necessary reagents. Almost every sample I assay, has Sulphur in the sample. So I have learned of Sulphur effects on the bead/matte inter face, and how to deal with it by the addition of nitrates, or Iron. I have not done any assaying on e-waste, with the Silicon portion of the smelt.
Additions of Nitrates generally do not lead to excess Silica dissolution of the crucible. This is generally eroded by an excess of Soda Ash, Borax, or other basic ingredients.
Are you pouring the bulk metal into a cone mold, letting it freeze, knocking off all slag, remelting, then pour to shot, or pouring from furnace directly into water, thereby skipping a step?

 

[Ayham Hafez]

I am not the authority on smelting. From what I have read and done for assaying, I have never used the addition of Sulphur as a flux, to my assays/smelts. Nor have I ever seen Sulphur as a flux in an assayers book of necessary reagents. Almost every sample I assay, has Sulphur in the sample. So I have learned of Sulphur effects on the bead/matte inter face, and how to deal with it by the addition of nitrates, or Iron. I have not done any assaying on e-waste, with the Silicon portion of the smelt.
Additions of Nitrates generally do not lead to excess Silica dissolution of the crucible. This is generally eroded by an excess of Soda Ash, Borax, or other basic ingredients.
Are you pouring the bulk metal into a cone mold, letting it freeze, knocking off all slag, remelting, then pour to shot, or pouring from furnace directly into water, thereby skipping a step?

I use cone mold then melt again and make shots.

I think sulphur is the best option to push base metals into slag, even we can reduce the copper content in the molten metal in case its very high, I did a test on different network coax gold plated connectors, they have very high content of copper and since I use nitric to part the copper I added 10% sulphur to the connectors, used small amount of soda ash,borax and fluoride since most of the connectors is metallic part, after pouring the cone I got 50% of the main connectors weights, I believe if I increased the content of sulphur to double will push all copper into slag, but in this case I have to add some silver to make sure I collect all gold beads, theory,if I want to recover the copper I can remelt the slag with adding some iron or I can just mill and roast the slags to get rid off sulphur.


Using sulphur from my test is much faster and cheaper than using copper electrolysis cell or nitric parting, I got same amount of gold that usually got from same type of connectors using hydrometallurgy process.

I want to get some advices before use sulphur in large batches, now I'm planning to first smelt pyrolized connectors without sulphur in the flux so I will have wide molten metals space into my flat crucible ( its a customized furnace), then I will add the sulphur to ic chips and mlcc's ash and feed them above the molten connectors, so I can make sure the molten connectors will collect the metallic parts of the ic chips, then the sulphur will start to sulphurize the base metals, then pour into the cone mold.

Sulphur makes the smelting and gold recovering very easy and controllable, this make me confused if I make something wrong, hope I will get some advices about it.

 

[Ayham Hafez]

I got the idea of using sulphur from my friend, I think he got the idea from this video




So I think its effective way, but the video shows that tin not react with sulphur, I don't know how, I make some research and found that tin displace copper in copper sulphate ore, he only did two tests, one with 5% sulphur and other with 100% sulphur, maybe if he increased sulphur to 10 or 20% he will get tin sulphate.

 

[Yggdrasil]

I use cone mold then melt again and make shots.

I think sulphur is the best option to push base metals into slag, even we can reduce the copper content in the molten metal in case its very high, I did a test on different network coax gold plated connectors, they have very high content of copper and since I use nitric to part the copper I added 10% sulphur to the connectors, used small amount of soda ash,borax and fluoride since most of the connectors is metallic part, after pouring the cone I got 50% of the main connectors weights, I believe if I increased the content of sulphur to double will push all copper into slag, but in this case I have to add some silver to make sure I collect all gold beads, theory,if I want to recover the copper I can remelt the slag with adding some iron or I can just mill and roast the slags to get rid off sulphur.


Using sulphur from my test is much faster and cheaper than using copper electrolysis cell or nitric parting, I got same amount of gold that usually got from same type of connectors using hydrometallurgy process.

I want to get some advices before use sulphur in large batches, now I'm planning to first smelt pyrolized connectors without sulphur in the flux so I will have wide molten metals space into my flat crucible ( its a customized furnace), then I will add the sulphur to ic chips and mlcc's ash and feed them above the molten connectors, so I can make sure the molten connectors will collect the metallic parts of the ic chips, then the sulphur will start to sulphurize the base metals, then pour into the cone mold.

Sulphur makes the smelting and gold recovering very easy and controllable, this make me confused if I make something wrong, hope I will get some advices about it.

To me adding Sulfur seems strange.
It melts at 112C and boils off at less than 500C.
As it vaporizes it will burn with a blue flame and create SO₂
Maybe it can react with some substances, but most will be too cold to react much, before the Sulfur is vaporized and gone.

 

[Ayham Hafez]

To me adding Sulfur seems strange.
It melts at 112C and boils off at less than 500C.
As it vaporizes it will burn with a blue flame and create SO₂
Maybe it can react with some substances, but most will be too cold to react much, before the Sulfur is vaporized and gone.

That a good point, usually roasting evaporate the sulphur as an element with low temperature as you mentioned, but how its not depends on my experiment and Jason video?

When I added 10% sulphur I added it depends on small calculation, sulphur density is about 25% of copper density, so I added 10% only and I lost 50% of copper content into sulphide so I think all added sulphur contaminated with copper