RAM refining questions

[guycanadian]

Hello. Thanks for giving me a moment of your time.

I have been reading extensively on how to refine gold from various methodologies and techniques outlined in the forum here.

I believe I managed to dissolve some gold in an acid solution, with a bit of oxidizer, as my ram fingers are now bare to the board. The solution is blue and at the time of dissolving was slightly green. I am suspect that Chlorine may have been what gave it a yellow tint, and I gave that time to be destroyed by sunlight by leaving the container outside for 2 days. I did make the mistake of leaving the RAM chip in the solution but I had tilted it far enough it was stuck to the container out of the solution a few inches.

I have filtered the solvent and found a very fine black powder that passed through a coffee filter, while some remained. The solution appears to be nothing but blue now, like Gatorade.

Is it possible I cemented the gold out of solution with the copper still on parts of the board? Would this be the black precipitate I'm seeing?


I have created some stannous chloride by heating some hcl(20ml) distilled water(30ml), a few drops of 30% h2o2 and some fishing weights I'm 99% sure are tin, as they cry when bit, and do not show any serious coloration indicating they are a bismuth tin alloy( kind of yellowish according to the pictures I can find)

With the first solution, did I destroy my stannous chloride with the addition of hydrogen peroxide?
I noticed a white precipitate forming but quickly re dissolving everytime I gave it a slight shake, at approx 50C (fruit dehydrator for heating).

I tested this solution of stannous chloride against my dissolved ram chip solution, which showed a very VERY faint red ring on the stain, and a large yellow spot where the stannous chloride did not interact with the solution.

I second guessed myself and tossed this mixture thinking it was a dud, and only when I dried the filter paper did I notice the reddish ring and the yellow spot appeared. It has not faded since it appeared.

Second question, does stannous chloride normally turn paper yellow when dried? If it doesn't does this indicate a very low ppm but positive indication that the gold is still in solution?

I have calculated that I probably have about 75 to 125 ppm gold dissolved as a rough estimate, and upon inspection of others results in the forum, this faint brown ring might be an indicator of gold being present in solution?

I also threw a very small chunk of zinc anode into a small cup of the solution and noticed that it immediately turned black, and copper started to rain out of the solvent as shiny reddish copper particles.
Is the zinc turning black because the gold is cementing to it? This solution should contain a large amount of CuCl by the look of it and the chemistry involved, but maybe its just oxidizing? I'm not sure.

I am making up a gold standard testing solution and more stannous chloride without peroxide and what I believe to be an excess of tin (12g to approx 50ml of HCl(50% dissolved in 24h, slow boat to China indeed!) , but as I live basically in the middle of no where, I have to wait to find a source of gold chloride or fine quality gold to melt in HCl and H2O2 and test my stannous against that.

Thank you for reading over my problems, and any advice is very welcome.

 

[guycanadian]

I have some pictures but need to get to my pc to resize them and I will upload asap

 

[Alondro]

Zinc is going to drop almost all the metals from the solution. Better to use copper to cement precious metals.

Also, are you only dissolving the RAM gold fingers? You need to trim the parts off with just the fingers on them. The chips also have gold, but they must be ashed in a full incineration procedure. Any carbon remaining will bind gold.

The best procedure for gold fingers and pins is to use concentrated HCl with a few mls of copper chloride mixed in. This is called the AP process, and the copper chloride acts as a catalyst, aiding the dissolution of more copper and other base metals, forming more copper chloride and causing the reaction to proceed even faster until it becomes saturated, at which point you'll see both green crystals of copper (II) chloride and white crystals of copper (i) chloride forming. Then you pour off the solution and add new HCl (the existing copper chloride crystals will provide the new catalyst). Once the metal is gone except for the gold foils, then wash with HCl and then several changes of HOT distilled water to clean up your gold foils.

The copper chloride-filled waste solutions should be put into a bottle or bucket with some copper pipe, to cement any gold that dissolved (a little will always end up in solution).

I also dilute my waste with my tap water (which is ground water with minerals that complex with some transition metals and settle out as a white-gray powder), let the tin and other metals settle out. Then the blue solution goes into a clear vessel and I drop copper using a simple galvanic method with an iron bar and a copper rod connected with a copper wire (outside the solution), which generated a weak electric current and drops the copper rapidly as lovely crystals!

 

[guycanadian]

Zinc is going to drop almost all the metals from the solution. Better to use copper to cement precious metals.

Also, are you only dissolving the RAM gold fingers? You need to trim the parts off with just the fingers on them. The chips also have gold, but they must be ashed in a full incineration procedure. Any carbon remaining will bind gold.

The best procedure for gold fingers and pins is to use concentrated HCl with a few mls of copper chloride mixed in. This is called the AP process, and the copper chloride acts as a catalyst, aiding the dissolution of more copper and other base metals, forming more copper chloride and causing the reaction to proceed even faster until it becomes saturated, at which point you'll see both green crystals of copper (II) chloride and white crystals of copper (i) chloride forming. Then you pour off the solution and add new HCl (the existing copper chloride crystals will provide the new catalyst). Once the metal is gone except for the gold foils, then wash with HCl and then several changes of HOT distilled water to clean up your gold foils.

The copper chloride-filled waste solutions should be put into a bottle or bucket with some copper pipe, to cement any gold that dissolved (a little will always end up in solution).

I also dilute my waste with my tap water (which is ground water with minerals that complex with some transition metals and settle out as a white-gray powder), let the tin and other metals settle out. Then the blue solution goes into a clear vessel and I drop copper using a simple galvanic method with an iron bar and a copper rod connected with a copper wire (outside the solution), which generated a weak electric current and drops the copper rapidly as lovely crystals!

I will try to use some copper I have for another cementation and see what happens.
Thank you.
I did not incinerate the board as I am trying to find a way to recover the gold with minimal energy input.
This particular ram chip had small gold circles all over it for through hole connectors and what appeared to be gold plated connectors under every IC so I used it whole.

If copper cements gold out as a fine black precipitate as other threads in this forum suggest then I believe I have accidentally cemented the gold out before attempted reduction by leaving the RAM chip in solution oh so barely for a few days

 

[guycanadian]

I will try to use some copper I have for another cementation and see what happens.
Thank you.

I am dissolving the gold directly and I appear to be minimally dissolving copper. I want to confirm this. It may be a serious discovery.

I have also found that I most likely destroyed my stannous chloride by converting it all into stannic chloride with the peroxide.
Lesson learned.

 

[guycanadian]

The best procedure for gold fingers and pins is to use concentrated HCl with a few mls of copper chloride mixed in. This is called the AP process, and the copper chloride acts as a catalyst, aiding the dissolution of more copper and other base metals, forming more copper chloride and causing the reaction to proceed even faster until it becomes saturated, at which point you'll see both green crystals of copper (II) chloride and white crystals of copper (i) chloride forming. Then you pour off the solution and add new HCl (the existing copper chloride crystals will provide the new catalyst). Once the metal is gone except for the gold foils, then wash with HCl and then several changes of HOT distilled water to clean up your gold foils.

I will use this to make some gold standard solution. Thank you again.

 

[guycanadian]

Please delete

 

[guycanadian]

Apparently I still have a lot to learn. I was poking around and it appears you guys have already decoded the snake oil I fell for.

I feel like a fool. Sorry to waste your time

 

[Yggdrasil]

Hello. Thanks for giving me a moment of your time.

I have been reading extensively on how to refine gold from various methodologies and techniques outlined in the forum here.

I believe I managed to dissolve some gold in an acid solution, with a bit of oxidizer, which oxidizer? as my ram fingers are now bare to the board. This is a completely wrong approach which indicate you have not studied half as much as you should have. The solution is blue and at the time of dissolving was slightly green. I am suspect that Chlorine may have been what gave it a yellow tint, and I gave that time to be destroyed by sunlight by leaving the container outside for 2 days. I did make the mistake of leaving the RAM chip in the solution but I had tilted it far enough it was stuck to the container out of the solution a few inches.
What we do is to dissolve the base metals to an extent that the Gold falls off the PCB.
Then we dissolve the Gold in a separate process.
If not, the Gold will dissolve for then to cement out on base metals and that can happen inside the PCB.
I have filtered the solvent and found a very fine black powder that passed through a coffee filter, while some remained. The solution appears to be nothing but blue now, like Gatorade.

Is it possible I cemented the gold out of solution with the copper still on parts of the board? Would this be the black precipitate I'm seeing?
Yes, but it may be any thing else too. How many ram sticks did you process?

I have created some stannous chloride by heating some hcl(20ml) distilled water(30ml), a few drops of 30% h2o2 and some fishing weights I'm 99% sure are tin, as they cry when bit, and do not show any serious coloration indicating they are a bismuth tin alloy( kind of yellowish according to the pictures I can find) What in the world made you use Peroxide in here?

With the first solution, did I destroy my stannous chloride with the addition of hydrogen peroxide?
Maybe, I have never heard about Peroxide in the Stannous before.
I noticed a white precipitate forming but quickly re dissolving everytime I gave it a slight shake, at approx 50C (fruit dehydrator for heating). No need for heating after the Tin is dissolved, I personally do not use heat at all.

I tested this solution of stannous chloride against my dissolved ram chip solution, which showed a very VERY faint red ring on the stain, and a large yellow spot where the stannous chloride did not interact with the solution. Gold tests clear Purple.

I second guessed myself and tossed this mixture thinking it was a dud, and only when I dried the filter paper did I notice the reddish ring and the yellow spot appeared. It has not faded since it appeared.

Second question, does stannous chloride normally turn paper yellow when dried? If it doesn't does this indicate a very low ppm but positive indication that the gold is still in solution? I don't think so, but it all depends on the paper I guess.

I have calculated that I probably have about 75 to 125 ppm gold dissolved as a rough estimate, and upon inspection of others results in the forum, this faint brown ring might be an indicator of gold being present in solution? Interesting, how have you calculated this?

I also threw a very small chunk of zinc anode into a small cup of the solution and noticed that it immediately turned black, and copper started to rain out of the solvent as shiny reddish copper particles.
Is the zinc turning black because the gold is cementing to it? This solution should contain a large amount of CuCl by the look of it and the chemistry involved, but maybe its just oxidizing? I'm not sure.

I am making up a gold standard testing solution and more stannous chloride without peroxide and what I believe to be an excess of tin (12g to approx 50ml of HCl(50% dissolved in 24h, slow boat to China indeed!) , but as I live basically in the middle of no where, I have to wait to find a source of gold chloride or fine quality gold to melt in HCl and H2O2 and test my stannous against that.
Get your naming correct, melting is done by heat dissolution is what is done when you put something into solution.

Thank you for reading over my problems, and any advice is very welcome.

I will comment in Bold inside the Quote.

 

[guycanadian]

I will comment in Bold inside the Quote.

I read a few papers and believed I could just selectively dissolve the gold. I only did one ram chip and used calcium hypochlorite as an oxidizer.

I'm well aware this isn't the normal method people use for seperation of foils from the board, but this was not my goal.

I tried to decode the pseudoscience of the green gold methods proposed over the last few years and didn't realize they used thiourea derivatives hidden in Markham drawings. Never had to deal with those before.

The use of peroxide was from misreading stannic as stannous when digging through papers on preparing it. I need to stop researching late at night. It does make stannic chloride quite well apparently.

Sorry for misusing terminology like melting vs dissolving. I have been reading for days on end non stop and made a mistake.

 

[Yggdrasil]

I read a few papers and believed I could just selectively dissolve the gold. I only did one ram chip and used calcium hypochlorite as an oxidizer.

I'm well aware this isn't the normal method people use for seperation of foils from the board, but this was not my goal.

I tried to decode the pseudoscience of the green gold methods proposed over the last few years and didn't realize they used thiourea derivatives hidden in Markham drawings. Never had to deal with those before.

The use of peroxide was from misreading stannic as stannous when digging through papers on preparing it. I need to stop researching late at night. It does make stannic chloride quite well apparently.

Sorry for misusing terminology like melting vs dissolving. I have been reading for days on end non stop and made a mistake.

The Gold from one RAM stick will barely be visible, even if you get it all out.
We are talking about fractions of a gram.
How was your plan of precipitating it from the solution?

 

[guycanadian]

The Gold from one RAM stick will barely be visible, even if you get it all out.
We are talking about fractions of a gram.
How was your plan of precipitating it from the solution?

There really wasn't one. This has just been to test the claims of a paper I read recently and I thought the RAM chip I had was so old the fingers were solid gold, not plated, so it didn't appear to attack any exposed copper from my first attempts at hitting this chip with acids and peeling some.of the green laminated layer off.

If it had worked I have a friend who apparently could have had it analyzed properly for me. I can't remember the acronym he said but I believe the process used x-rays to find chemical wavelengths.

 

[guycanadian]

There really wasn't one. This has just been to test the claims of a paper I read recently and I thought the RAM chip I had was so old the fingers were solid gold, not plated, so it didn't appear to attack any exposed copper from my first attempts at hitting this chip with acids and peeling some.of the green laminated layer off.

If it had worked I have a friend who apparently could have had it analyzed properly for me. I can't remember the acronym he said but I believe the process used x-rays to find chemical wavelengths.

Let me correct that. The paper claimed this solvent mixture would only dissolve a small amount of copper vs the gold supposedly having dissolved completely.

I had a sneaking suspicion the paper might have been too good to be true, so I didn't really want to post what chemicals I'm using exactly, in case someone reads my first few posts and tries to replicate this experiment, thusly putting themselves at pretty great risk.


I probably don't come across as someone who's doing this safely, but I want to assure you I see every chemical process involved in the dissolution of precious metals as potentially lethal and extremely dangerous.
The mere fact that I cannot know exactly what's in this stick of RAM gives me the heebie jeebies about some of the fumes that could be coming off the polypropylene container I did it in.

I do have properly rated respirators and gloves, and only do any reactions outside in a well ventilated area. I've also been avoiding nitric thus far, as my hope was this process wouldn't need it.

 

[guycanadian]

Overall I really do appreciative your advice Yggdrasil, and if I do decide to get into this I will make sure I finish hokes book before I continue.

I'm going to stop here though, because this won't work in the way I thought it would. If it had, very many possibilities could have been made real about recycling and refining in 3rd would countries. It really sucks. I was hoping really hard this could help people in the long run

 

[Yggdrasil]

Let me correct that. The paper claimed this solvent mixture would only dissolve a small amount of copper vs the gold supposedly having dissolved completely.

I had a sneaking suspicion the paper might have been too good to be true, so I didn't really want to post what chemicals I'm using exactly, in case someone reads my first few posts and tries to replicate this experiment, thusly putting themselves at pretty great risk.


I probably don't come across as someone who's doing this safely, but I want to assure you I see every chemical process involved in the dissolution of precious metals as potentially lethal and extremely dangerous.
The mere fact that I cannot know exactly what's in this stick of RAM gives me the heebie jeebies about some of the fumes that could be coming off the polypropylene container I did it in.

I do have properly rated respirators and gloves, and only do any reactions outside in a well ventilated area. I've also been avoiding nitric thus far, as my hope was this process wouldn't need it.

Respirators are for emergency use only.
They will only hold a short time and only against what it is rated for.
It is way to expensive for ordinary use.
Handling byproducts from the reactions without gloves, like you show in your stannous pictures is not recommended either.
Ram or any addon card from computers have never been solid Gold it has always been plated or as lately ENIG.

 

[Yggdrasil]

Please delete

We do not delete posts, specially when they have been replied to, it breaks the integrity of subsequent posts.

 

[Yggdrasil]

I read a few papers and believed I could just selectively dissolve the gold. I only did one ram chip and used calcium hypochlorite as an oxidizer.

I'm well aware this isn't the normal method people use for seperation of foils from the board, but this was not my goal.

I tried to decode the pseudoscience of the green gold methods proposed over the last few years and didn't realize they used thiourea derivatives hidden in Markham drawings. Never had to deal with those before.

The use of peroxide was from misreading stannic as stannous when digging through papers on preparing it. I need to stop researching late at night. It does make stannic chloride quite well apparently.

Sorry for misusing terminology like melting vs dissolving. I have been reading for days on end non stop and made a mistake.

Green Gold is indeed pseudoscience, no matter how "green" or non toxic your chemicals may be, the moment you put metals into it by dissolving it, it is no longer green or non toxic.