Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Ingeneious palladium idea, or just foolishness?

Intergalactic_Captain - 15-2-2007 at 19:10

I've been searching high and low for a couple weeks for a simple way to extract palladium from used catalytic converters. I'd really rather not use some expensive combination of acids, despite the fact that the value of palladium justifies it. I don't really need the metal per se, just as a catalyst.

Thinking about palladium on charcoal, is it the large surface area full of palladium particles or the large amount of tiny palladium particles that does the job? A catalytic converter is basically ceramic a honeycomb of tiny tubes embedded with palladium particles. If I just smashed it up, screened it for dust and saved the chunks of an arbitrarily chosen size, would they function anything like Pd/C in a catalytic hydrogenation?

[Edited on 2-16-07 by Intergalactic_Captain]

BromicAcid - 15-2-2007 at 19:15

There is some information on that idea here:

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=5700&a...