Silver Extraction

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With the price of silver compared to gold I wouldn’t worry too much about the silver :shock:
Is this elemental zinc and silver ? If so you can dissolve in nitric which will also dissolve the silver leaving the gold and then cement the silver out of solution using copper.
 
Thank you for your help! Am sorry for the error I made My task is to extract 0.018Ag and 0.06Au separately

am having a zinc recycling idea, so am wondering if i use zinc instead of copper

First of all am thinking the use of aqua regia to dissolve gold, am wondering if it will not dissolve both gold and silver : :?


Any idea?
 
And what is the remaining 97.6%, pure zinc metal, zinc oxide, zinc hydroxide? Water logged or dry? Is the pH acidic, neutral or basic?

Have you tried to use lye, sodium hydroxide? It will dissolve all of the above forms of zinc, forming sodium zincate which is water soluble. The zinc can be electrowon directly from solution, keeping the amount of waste down. The leach could even be reused after electrowinning. Gold and silver should be left in a concentrate that can be leached with nitric acid for recovery of silver first and then adding hydrochloric acid to dissolve gold and anything left by the nitric acid. The gold should be easily recovered at this point by standard precipitants like SMB or copperas.

Cementing silver on copper gives a more pure silver than if you are using zinc. Zinc will cement iron, nickel, tin, ... almost any other metal. If what you have is silver, gold and zinc only then you could use zinc to cement the silver without any extra contamination. It's hard to give any better advice without more details.

Göran
 
Thank you @G-axelsson
ZnO 53.1017%
SO3: 35.6848%
SiO2: 3.8063
Fe2O3: 2.3868
Al2O3: 1.4861
PbO: 1.127
K20: 0.6364
MnO: 0.5904
CaO: 0.4509
using ICP MS small concentration of gold and silver found which is 0.006% gold and 0.018% silver of which i want to extract

i have tried first with reduction roasting to remove sulfur but not working at all since sulfur reduced till 11% but not full removed.

And my inquiries goes on gold and silver content, I think it is very hard to find the economical way to extract that content :roll:


Is there any new advice?
 
To me it looks like most of it would be water soluble, ZnO + SO3 looks like it's really ZnSO4. Is the silver and gold in soluble compounds or as solid particles? Maybe you could split the materials in a soluble Zn + Ag sulfate part and solids fraction rich in gold.

0.006% gold and 0.018% silver = 60 ppm gold and 180 ppm silver, or 60 g Au and 180 g Ag per ton. This is way better than any gold ore so if you have enough material there should exist a method to recover silver, gold and zinc from the source. With the composition you have I would try to use an acid based method with sulfuric acid added to leach out any zinc and silver. It is very possible that the silver would follow the zinc and a zinc refining step is needed (electrolytic) to separate silver and zinc.

An acidic (sulfuric acid) zinc sulfate solution could easily be turned back into zinc and more sulfuric acid by electrowinning.

If gold is in a soluble form it can be turned back into solid form by carefully adding zinc metal to cement any less reactive metals. The next step there would depend on how concentrated you can get the gold and what the contaminants would be.

This is all a theoretical speculation based on reading a lot about electrowinning, leaching ores and some experiments with both acidic and hydroxide based electrowinning of zinc from spent batteries.
I have no practical experience from large scale extraction of zinc.

It's an interesting topic that I've done some literature searches on.

Göran
 
I think you should dissolve it in acids, extract zinc with electrowinning cell and collect values in sludge of cell.
Or maybe melt the sludge and put the zinc bars in the electrolysis cell
 
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