over the first few weeks of the new year, i have been continuing to experiment with alkaline glycine leaching of base metals as a renewable process for liberating gold from plated printed circuit boards. before i get into the details, i need to reiterate something for my own sake that has cost me many hours on multiple occasions: when trying out novel techniques from a paper, run the calculations on the numbers to determine the scale of the process for a useful result.
well i guess since microblogging seems to be a collectively failed social experiment we might as well make one step backwards in technological time and try this out. idk what i'll really be posting here. maybe work logs, maybe stupid jokes that i have no other outlet for. who knows! i do like the idea of being able to wikilink to relevant works and observations within my own blog posts and have citations of sort for additional context.
idk we'll see where it goes i guess. i think most importantly though i put a photo of my cat here:
i've been hyperfixating on gold recovery from ewaste and looking at ways to do it without the use of mineral acids where possible, and minimizing the loss of reagents. it's all very arbitrary and subjective, but i decided to put down some of my thoughts over at the alkaline glycine process page with some photos of my first experiments with the procedure. eventually i'd like to make a video overview of the process once i've gone through it fully myself (waste/input material -> dissolution of base metals -> filter solids -> dissolution of precious metals -> filter and discard solids -> recovery of complexed base and precious metals -> purification and reuse of ligand solution).
well i suppose i might need to eat my words regarding the "trying new things isn't disrespectful to those who come before us" thing at least in terms of AGP (alkaline glycine process) for extraction of base metals. the regenerative property of the Copper(II) Chloride process does seem fairly robust, hands off, and reliable. reading more about it, once you have copper chloride in solution, it oxidizes the copper, which reacts to form more copper chloride with the free chloride ions in solution, and the H+ ions form more water with the dissolved oxygen in solution. all that being factored in, and ignoring, for simplicity, the contamination and depletion of copper chloride in solution by more reactive base metals, it really is as simple as adjusting three things to keep the solution viable:
- free chloride ions (addition of HCl)
- dissolved oxygen (air pump bubbling through solution)
- concentration of copper ions in solution (overall volume of solution relative to other substances)