Two alloys from one hot recovery.

[justinhcase]

I have been processing my primary wast barrel. (seeded with copper)
Because my main activity is the inquartion of scrap gold jewelry this is mostly silver chloride with the odd small particles of Au, Pt, Pd.
So I converted as much as I could of the AgCL in a drum mixer with iron and sulphuric acid.
Then washed and dried the solid, before mixing with a flux that was slightly alkaline and running through my furnace.
I slowly increased the loiter time and temperature.
My first few runs at about 1200c and just over an hour produced very little metal with lots of small beads visible in the cooled flux.
So ramped up both the loiter time and temperature.
now I seem to get two distinct alloys from one hot recovery at the same time.
A heavie dirty silver alloy and a lighter distinctly separate alloy on top that in my cone mold.
The first alloy is not attracted to a magnet but the second is very attractive to a magnet and looked like stainless steel.
The more I loitered and the hotter I ran the larger that second alloy recovery got.
The dirty silver alloy worked fine when put back into an inquartation if only a little dirtier than one would like.
But the second stayed intact well above 1200c so was taken out of the melting dish for further inspection.
These buttons have survived both nitric acid and A.R.
Have any of you had your waste separated into two alloys?
I intend to try and see if they will alloy with copper instead of sterling next.
Any suggestions?

 

[Lino1406]

The magnetic part contains iron. Take a sample, dissolve in AR and check for PMs

 

[justinhcase]

Yes, I did try that.
I managed to get a little into an A.R. solution.
But did not get any reaction to my stannous chloride test and only a weak color with D.M.G. once I applied ammonia indicating a nickel content.
I did observe a number of differing arias of reaction. some spots did generate bubbles some completely inert.
I even tried leaving them in a leftover copper solution in the hope that any iron would cement out the copper.
But this only produced a little elemental Nickl before the reaction stopped, this does seem quite hardened to chemical reaction.
Having managed to react so little of the alloy I am still hopeful to find some value once I manage to break it down completely.

 

[snoman701]

Probably a magnetic stainless alloy of sorts. Immiscible with the silver later. Poor rinsing of the iron/sulphuric conversion, and the iron dropping out nickel from poor rinsing of the silver chloride.

Really rinsing the silver/iron is hard without re-mixing with clean water a few times after filtering down.

Also easy to get silver sulphide that then NEEDS iron added to the melt.


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[justinhcase]

I did add a little iron rod while smelting in case I had inadvertently produced any sulfides and to mix the mass.
So some iron is to be expected, along with every other metallic impurity I have encountered while processing.
Most of them will not simply wash out as they share similar chemistry and solubility to our target elements.
That is what makes waste treatment by far the most interesting part of the process.
It is like making your own raw ore to work from.
And yes it appeared to be a very nice stainless steel at first, but the other alloy inclusions became apparent as there reaction is not uniform.
All the Stainless Steel alloys I know of would have succumbed to A.R. quite readily
When heated with an Ox/propane torch I could see a silvery metal form droplets that wept out like small beads of sweat.
Tempted to keep one button for future reference as an A.R. hardened Stainless steel alloy might be of use some time.
As they did not alloy with silver very well I am thinking of trying copper today to see if I can bring it to a point where I can leach off the base metals.
I also thought about electro degradation as a possibility.