Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Orange percipate from AR soluation, cpu refining

noxnox - 1-9-2012 at 00:35

This is just a curiosity for me, as I don't run into a lot of crap cpus often, while dissolving lot of them with weak AR sol there came a point a massive orange/yellow participate fell out of the sol, dealing with over a liter of solution, and wondering what it could be I stopped the leaching collected all of the solution and nearly all of the participate after a 5 min spin in the centrifuge this weird orange stuff was isolated.

going about my business I set it aside and placed the now clean sol back on the cpus again, and again more of this orange stuff participated, so I turned to a sample of the pure stuff upon adding hcl it dissolve into a nice bright yellow solution

I still don't know what this is, but i do know its formed for a lack of chlorine in the ar solution, as i had been adding a 20% nitric acid solution that was left over from removing the silver and the lead/tin from the cpu's prior to the gold

I believe that it is likely a chloride salt as it has poor solubility in nitric acid

anyone have any ideas what could make an orange chloride????

[Edited on 1-9-2012 by noxnox]

elementcollector1 - 1-9-2012 at 07:38

Auric chloride?

cyanureeves - 1-9-2012 at 08:09

maybe iron? or resin of some kind? because isnt gold suppose to go into solution with aqua regia? but so is iron huh? i have failed to drop any gold in my last four attempts. i have even gotten purple color on the stannous chloride test on what turns out to be just brass. i use sodium metabisulfate to drop gold and just when i'm about to blame my method,everything works right when i drop from karat gold jewelry. i struck gold when i came across a ring marked 10 kp and thought it meant plated gold but was actually karat plumb.

plante1999 - 1-9-2012 at 08:27

cyanureeves, do you remove all nitric acid before adding the metabisulfite? Metabisulfite is oxidized to sulphate with nitric acid.

noxnox - 1-9-2012 at 09:09

cyanureeves: Metabisulfite can take days to a week dependent on the solution for a full participation, it never happens fast especially if you fail to add HCL this is my favorite method of participation from Halox solutions (bleach+hcl) which is my favorite cheap way of refining kt gold that tests negative for silver as the participation works perfectly as meta kills the ORP and makes an excess of SO2. If you can get purple of Cassius with he SnCl test likely all of the nitric is gone as that test does not work in the presence of HNO3, if you get the color gold is there, however you will get the color even if the item is plated, as the test is sensitive to 1 ppm which generates a significant purple color.

As for my orange goop its not gold, but that would be really nice :D, as i collected about 2 ounces of it cemented in the centrifuge jar, Im only expecting 4 or 5 grams of Au, iron is possible but not sure where it would have come from in the CPUs are made of mostly copper in there makeup, but i suppose the pins could contain iron, but iron chloride very soluble and typically decomposes to brown iron oxide.


I thinking its something strange from the ceramic, just can't put my finger on it

cyanureeves - 1-9-2012 at 09:15

plante i dry it all on a coffee maker burner and can see the brown crust form as when gold is forming and even add more muratic acid but i think nitric is still in there and all goes into solution again.i even done two cpu parts for a co-worker and nothing dropped, bad thing was he saw all the gold flakes peel off and floating when i stripped the boards. it was quite a bit of gold because they were old computers and in spite them being my computers, he felt ripped off because i gave them to him.i should of gave him the blue solution but he doesnt know anything about gold recovery.

plante1999 - 1-9-2012 at 09:23

U2U me if you want, I already have extracted gold from CPU without nitrate (costly) and efficiently.

noxnox - 1-9-2012 at 10:42

add some urea into the soluation this will bind the HNO3 into urea nitrate, also you never add strong HCL to freshly SO2 participated gold oxide/sulfide, it can re-dissolve and become gold chloride again, you should only add enough HCL at the beginning to free the SO2 from the meta

[Edited on 1-9-2012 by noxnox]