xsspirito said:
What if I get rid of polymers and melt the glass and metal ?
What will I end up with?
Any toughs?
OK... I'm going to try that tomorrow in the lab
P.S. The thing is I have 400kg of copper and not sure the best action here, if it was an alloy the best option was electrolysis.
If I understood you correctly, by using the present PM prices (which are dropping rapidly), I came up with these approx. dollar values: Pd-$177K; Au-$378; Pt-$93K; Ag-$33K; Cu=643#. Not including the Cu (which I wouldn't worry about), that's a total of about $681,000, if I did the math right. If this were mine, I would do a lot of experimentation to find the best and most efficient method, changing only one variable at a time. I would also want to own an AA (for the liquids) and fire assay setup (for the solids and maybe the liquids) to track the metals through the experiments and the process.
These ideas are just that, ideas. They may or may not work. They look good on paper but, when actually doing it, things crop up that you hadn't considered. However, you have to start somewhere. I'm sure there are other possible ways. Maybe, Lou, Harold, 4metals, and others can chime in.
Eliminating the organics and then melting was also my first thought. If you can make it work, that would certainly be the cleanest way to go. Ideally, you would end up with assayable bars containing all the metals, which you could either deal to a large refiner or process yourself (let's deal with that later), plus a lot of slag which could easily hang up BBs of metal unless you could thin it properly (maybe, fluorspar). The melting point of most glasses is quite high, but the melting point of many can be lowered (to maybe 1000C) by the addition of definite quantities of sodium carbonate. At this temperature, you could use a gas furnace. If the slag is thin enough, most all of the BBs will settle by casting into a large size, pre-heated, cast iron, cone mold, if you can keep the slag molten long enough. I have also heard of people casting into a large cone-shaped depression formed in pre-heated casting sand. That would keep everything molten for a long time.
If all the individual metals, glass, etc., are in separate particles, and the metals are not alloyed or bound up with the glass, you could leach out all the Pd, Ag, and Cu with nitric. For the whole lot, I estimate it would take about 600 gallons (11-12 drums) of 70% nitric cut 50/50 with distilled water and heated. You could use a non-magnetic stainless tank for the nitric. After this, I would use a huge vacuum filter and rinse well. Then, leach the Au and Pt with either aqua regia or HCl/strong H2O2. The latter might be best since you wouldn't have to deal with the elimination of excess nitric before dropping the metals. Besides being able to rinse all the values in solution from all of that glass, the biggest problems I see are dropping the Pd from the nitric solution and all of that dissolved copper present. Any excess of nitric will have to removed first. Therefore, try to use only a slight excess of nitric, no matter how slow it goes. To me, the simplest way to remove an excess of nitric is to use sulfamic acid.
http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=10799&p=105096&hilit=sulfamic+acid#p105096
You could probably leach everything but the silver with aqua regia or HCl/H2O2 (possibly best), and then go after the silver with nitric. However, depending on the particle size, a certain portion of the silver could be converted to silver chloride. This wouldn't dissolve in the nitric and would possibly be lost, since leaching out AgCl with ammonia, sodium cyanide, or sodium thiosulfate would be a bear.