Jon
It makes no difference to the leaching if ammonium or sodium or potassium thiocyanate is used.
By using liquid ammonium form you get around the worry of keeping the thiocyanate, in whichever form you want to use, in a dry state.
The thiocyanate part is the important bit for forming metal complexes, the sodium or ammonium just goes along for the ride.
How you use this leach depends on what you are wanting to leach the precious metal from and what precious metals are present.
If you have the simplest combination of just gold plated on iron base ( this includes most forms of steel ) then run the leach at pH 1 to 2 using sulfuric or hydrochloric acid. Under these conditions the leach will need some iron in solution to act as an oxidiser before the gold will go into solution.
This leach form is very forgiving so there is no optimal iron level at which the leach must be run. Having less than theoretical iron levels just means that the leach is a bit slower, not that it will not work. Pretty well as long as you have iron colouring in the leach it will work.
Once some of the gold has been stripped the acid in the leach will start to attack the iron in the substrate. This will increase the iron level in the leach but will also raise the pH of the leach solution, this needs to be watched and more acid added if necessary. Keep in mind that generally 1% HCl solution will have a pH around 1 as will a 0.1% H2SO4 solution depending on what impurities are present in your water. This means that pH adjustment acid additions are usually very small, use a 1 to 5 ml disposable plastic pipette.
Hydrochloric acid will attack the iron much faster than sulfuric acid so if you are running large batches you want to use sulfuric acid so that you are not making a lot of iron complexes in your leach which you will have to deal with later. Also sulfuric acid is always readily available as battery acid at a cheaper price than hydrochloric acid.
I usually use around 5 grams of sodium thiocyanate per litre to ensure a reasonable leach rate. This gives a leach rate between cyanide and aqua regia. If you want it faster use more thiocyanate and dissolved iron.
If the gold is plated on a copper type base use a leach of maximum 5 g/l thiocyanate with just 5% sulfuric acid. Under these conditions the copper will form an insoluble copper thiocyanate layer which passivates the copper surface thus stopping acid attack on the copper.
If silver is also present in commercial quantities or at levels which will passivate the precious metal surface then you need to have the thiocyanate levels at 10 g/l of free sodium thiocyanate. Note that sodium and ammonium thiocyanate are interchangeable in this context.
This means that if you run this leach where the substrate is copper there will be no protective passivation of the copper when the precious metal layer is at least partly removed.
When using these leaches I always recover all dissolved metals with a carbon felt electrowin cell. No electrowin cell will strip all iron from a leach solution but if all other metals have been removed then bringing the residual solution to pH 7 will precipitate out the iron as an uncontaminated product which can be legally disposed of in landfill. The leftover solution of thiocyanate acts as a really good fertiliser. Thiocyanate is cheap enough that it is not worth trying to guess how much is left in the solution for re-use.
I dissolve the metals from the carbon felt in aqua regia and do a dibutyl ether recovery with oxalic acid finish if just gold is the precious metal I have leached.
If I have leached for low level silver as well as gold then I dissolve the metals from the carbon felt in aqua regia but adjust the liquor volume to keep all of the silver chloride in solution. An addition of pure table salt, not iodised, will cut down on the liquor volume needed. I adjust the pH to 1.5 with technical grade urea and precipitate the precious metals with sodium meta bisulfite.
Any contaminant metals in the residual aqua regia after the precipitation are removed by running it through another electrowin pass with the felt being reused multiple times until it is choked with base metals and it is then disposed of in an appropriate facility.
The above is easier than trying to play electrowinning games with voltages and current levels for clean precious metal recovery, it is not a system that is easy to control right through the process.
One obvious question is why do I use dibutyl ether instead of just a precipitation step when I have gold without silver.
It is cheaper to do the extraction method rather than the precipitation, the only chemical cost is the exchange of oxalic acid for gold.
You can drop metals directly from the leach solution with meta bisulfite but you will consume a lot of metabisulfite trying to knock out the iron in solution or the redox from the sulfuric acid. Way cheaper to do the electrowin step.
Deano