alvaschein
Active member
Hi all
I recently was digesting a sample of gold plated pins in AP. All was processing good, the gold foil was swimming. A few days later I checked again the process and found everything has been dissolved - even the gold foils!
Oh! And now? Knowing that in the solution I had only chloride ions, I tried to precipitate the dissolved gold with SMB. But nothing happened! Well ...
How can I get the gold out of the solution? I tried the next in simply pouring stannous chloride in this solution - just to see what happens. Surprisingly the solution turned turbid and gold particles started to precipitate! I thought "Cool, I found Columbus' egg! (just kidding...). Let's try it with an other gold solution out of AR.". Thought and made. I took a sample of the AR solution and poured stannous chloride in it. It happened like above, gold started dropping out.
I let it stand for a few minutes or so and looked again. Gosh! What happened? Everything is like before I poured in stannous chloride ... and my brain cells started to work. There must have been excess nitric in the AR solution that reversed the precipitation effect.
I took an other sample of AR and treated it to get rid of excess nitric. And the the same test as before, with the difference that the gold colloid remained in solution and didn't disappear. What a discovery! (sorry, kidding again)
No, what I'm pointing to is, that stannous chloride can be used for qualitative determinate if there is any excess nitric present or not. I simply don't know how sensitive this test could be.
There is an other test propagated to detect nitric, called brown ring-Test, but seems to be more complicated and stannous chloride is available in every gold refiner's kitchen.
I appreciate any comments to my observation, even if you find it is a truism...
Roy
I recently was digesting a sample of gold plated pins in AP. All was processing good, the gold foil was swimming. A few days later I checked again the process and found everything has been dissolved - even the gold foils!
Oh! And now? Knowing that in the solution I had only chloride ions, I tried to precipitate the dissolved gold with SMB. But nothing happened! Well ...
How can I get the gold out of the solution? I tried the next in simply pouring stannous chloride in this solution - just to see what happens. Surprisingly the solution turned turbid and gold particles started to precipitate! I thought "Cool, I found Columbus' egg! (just kidding...). Let's try it with an other gold solution out of AR.". Thought and made. I took a sample of the AR solution and poured stannous chloride in it. It happened like above, gold started dropping out.
I let it stand for a few minutes or so and looked again. Gosh! What happened? Everything is like before I poured in stannous chloride ... and my brain cells started to work. There must have been excess nitric in the AR solution that reversed the precipitation effect.
I took an other sample of AR and treated it to get rid of excess nitric. And the the same test as before, with the difference that the gold colloid remained in solution and didn't disappear. What a discovery! (sorry, kidding again)
No, what I'm pointing to is, that stannous chloride can be used for qualitative determinate if there is any excess nitric present or not. I simply don't know how sensitive this test could be.
There is an other test propagated to detect nitric, called brown ring-Test, but seems to be more complicated and stannous chloride is available in every gold refiner's kitchen.
I appreciate any comments to my observation, even if you find it is a truism...
Roy