All about silver button batteries

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Why don't you drop the silver directly from the silver diamine complex? I think returning it to silver chloride is unnecessary..
Simply give sugar to the solution and heat to 70°C (not boil).
 
After reading your reply Juan I recalled seeing some orange seals on some of the batteries that I had used in the first "test" batch I found a couple of VARTA shells but I was unable to find the seals that went with them and I was unable to find any orange seals anywhere in the residue/shells that were processed. This led me to believe that the orange colouration that I noticed in the solution was from the seal itself being dissolved in the Nitric Acid.

To partially prove my theory I took 10grams of Maxell Batteries. I cut them the exact same way as in the previous 100 gram test. I used 40ml's of Nitric acid and stirred the solution a couple of times within the 30mins. The first thing I noticed was the solution instead of being the Orange colouration from the first batch was a very very dark green. After filtering solution and cleaning up residue with some water and passing through the same filter the solution lightened slightly.

I then added a solution of 20mls of distilled water with roughly 6grams of salt dissolved as best as possible. Immediately the Silver Chloride dropped out of solution and was a bright white colour, the remaining solution was a light green colouration.

After rinsing the Silver Chloride twice with distilled water the colour of the rinse water was a light light yellow tint. After the third was the water was for the most part completely clear.

This leads me to believe that the Varta Batteries are to blame for the tan colouration that occurred with the first test of 100grams of Silver Oxide batteries

The next test that I will do when I get a chance is to either dissolve 1 Varta battery in a test tube with around 5mls of Nitric, do a 10gram batch of Varta Batteries with 40mls of Nitric, or disassemble 10 grams of Varta batteries and remove the seals process the batteries the same way and then use 40mls of nitric with just the seals from the Varta Batteries to see if the seals react to the Nitric and if so what colouration the Nitric acid takes on.
 
I have yet to carry on the tests with the varta batteries however I did process roughly 80grams +/- 3grams of verified Silver Oxide Batteries that were from Maxell, Sony, and Reneta if I had to guess I would say 50% were maxell and the rest made up the balance.Most of the Maxell batteries were very thin and small so possibly a thicker battery would have a higher Silver Oxide to battery casing rario. After processing exactly to the T from the document I melted and have a button that weighs 15.3grams I believe I have an additional at the very most 1 gram in the rinse water used that i have yet to process and in the filters used.

So If i had to put a number on it I would say around 16grams of Silver from the 80gram test batch of SR batteries
 
As a safety caution update when deciding to work with silver oxide batteries. I just bought a silver oxide watch battery new. The paper packing indicates a mercury content the metal package does not. House brand from Radio Shack.

Some safety measures for dealing with mercury might well save your health.
 

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And where do you find used batteries? Maybe one should ask watch sellers nearby..

The Meth story is correct! Yesterday I visited the military historic museum in Dresden and they show Meth pills used in the Second World War. They produced millions
and even gave them to children who had to help in anti air batteries at night.
 
can anyone suggest somewhere that pays the supposed $100 a lb for lithium? all of my searches have proven nada they all seem to want to charge a fee to take it.
 
Hi everybody,

I am new here and interested to adopt the Precious Metal Recovering from waste as business. I have come to know by reading this thread from start to end that about 2 grams of silver can be recovered from 10 grams of Silver Oxide button cells.
I want to ask that can we also get some precious metals from Alkaline and Lithium batteries also? If you than how?


Thanks
 
Juan Manuel Arcos Frank said:
Goldenaxe:

Alakline batteries contain zinc and carbon.Lithium batteries contain lithium but no PM.

Best regards.

Manuel
Click to expand...

Thanks Juan,

It means that we should only concentrate on Silver Oxide buttons.
 
Just read whole of this thread.
This is how we know.
And some of us who did few will go for up to 40% of weight.
 
butcher said:
yes I noticed You had all watch type battery's in your bag, my comment was for other members who may collect or save battery's and as a safety suggestion, Ni cads and other high current battery's can also be a danger, putting a piece of tape to keep them from shorting out is a good idea.
Click to expand...


thank you butcher for addressing this matter

yes, they will blow up and catch fire if shorted out, not fun at all
please use tape on them, it may only happen once in 10 years but you do not want it to happen in your home while your family is asleep
 
Juan Manuel Arcos Frank said:
baguskd:

I do not like acid boiling too...but less acid (1:1) will not dissolve all the silver/silver oxide pellet.You can add some hydrogen peroxide or wash nitric oxide gases with lye solution.

Be careful about selecting the batteries...I see in you bag some lithium and manganese dioxide type,remember,small batteries are silver type.

Best Regards.

Manuel
Click to expand...


So does it mean that for example S44 or Duracell 303/357 silver oxide batteries do not contain much silver since they are bigger than the rest?

Thanks
 
mkakavan:

Not at all...SR-44 silver oxide batteries are the best because they contain ... 1 gr. of silver!!!!,but they are pretty expensive so it is quite rare to find them .People prefer LR-44 manganese oxide battery because it is cheaper.

What I mean in my work is that you have to add an exact quantity of nitric acid,more acid than needed will rise costs and NOx gases,less acid than needed will not dissolve the silver/silver oxide pellet.

I hope it helps.

Kindest regards.

Manuel
 
Our scale only goes to 10 pounds and this bag pegged it out.

image.jpg

Looks like I'll be cutting open batteries so quite some time.

This will be my first venture into recovering metals from old batteries.
 
Better sort them first, some of the flat ones are lithium batteries, for example a CR2016 I spotted in the picture.

Göran
 
At the beginning of the year i had a client contact me about processing a ton batteries a month. Most people try to hammer mill the batteries open but this will lead to a high iron contamination. They were pulling as much iron out as possible with several methods but it was time consuming and troublesome. It was causing problems with the recover and refining stages because of the high iron content. I used a little physic and some engineering and $ 30,000 dollars later came up with the answer. I love silver batteries ! One important part is to do a good water wash to remove as much potassium or sodium as possible before you start the refining process. Once those problems are removed ( The opening of the batteries and Base that eats the acid ) then recover is simple. Here's the first video of them starting to get the design down pat.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oF8GvEKnhg&list=UU3lLIWQksiZIClYudB5gK3Q

I ran two types of tests – first filling a tube with batteries and heating them horizontally configured coil. I ran the heat for just 1.1 seconds and about 1/3 of the batteries exploded. Leaving the heat on longer would have certainly exploded all of them as every battery was expanded and ready to go.



We then changed the coil configuration to a vertical coil where we could just dispense the batteries down through the coil. With this configuration, we made a make shift paper funnel and dropped a handful of batteries through the coil. You could see smoke coming from the end of the tube, but we only had 1-2 batteries blow.



With this test we were running with 7.5kW of power and while we did not get any batteries to blow, they did get quite hot to the touch and most, if not all the gaskets had expanded. We feel the vertical approach would be the best approach to process a high volume of batteries, however the job would require more power and a special induction coil from rectangular tubing.



We are thinking that 25kW of power would be required for this job, which has a $31,000.00 budget and to design and build the proper coil you would be looking at $2-3,000.00. We do have a 25kW system in our lab to run further tests with, if your customer has the budget for the systems and is willing to fund the building of the proper coil for continued testing.



Right now the coil length we had was about 6” in length and we think we need to be about 8-10” in length, with a more robust design to handle the additional power.



I look forward to your review and response
 
I would recommend caution in that process, as you're likely to inadvertently introduce some mercury batteries.

Harold
 
That's a really interesting idea, Palladium. If I may contribute a thought...

Obviously the speed is pretty high (and a constant) when dropped through a vertical chute. As you've pointed out, to get the heating/time you want you need a longer induction coil which linearly requires more power. Diagonal feed will reduce the velocity but clogging is going to be trouble.

If it's still in the brainstorm stage, what about a hopper that feeds the input of a horizontal tube, on which you have a conveyer belt feed of adjustable speed? It would be fairly cheap to tool one up and could potentially give you huge savings in power costs in the long term.
 

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