How are you purifying your gold? Well, first I mix it with some silver.... :) Makes no sense at all until you learn about aqua regia. Keep on with your studies. The world needs people who understand chemistry.
I feel chemistry will be illegal here soon and the ones that do know will be highly valued in the future ..near future i never went to school for it but every thing I do know was self taught by watching sreetips and I can honestly say I have a 97.8% recovery rate by weight by watching his videos i can only imagine how tough it is but hang in there it will pay off soon enough
Quick tip: During the melt phase, base metal impurities and borax residue tend to form a tough invisible oxide layer on the ingot surface. Residual graphite from the mold can contribute to this. Quenching the finished ingot in water will partially dissolve this 'skin', but not completely. I discovered long ago that quenching the ingot in hydrochloric acid while it's still at red heat will completely dissolve any surface contamination without attacking the gold, leaving a much brighter gold finish than if it were quenched in water alone. When quenching in HCl, the ingot will initially seem not to react, almost as if it were cold. That's due to the Leidenfrost effect creating a bubble of hot HCl gas around the ingot. Within 5-10 seconds the acid will rapidly begin to boil as it begins to contact the still hot ingot. This boiling will increase in intensity for a few seconds, until it abruptly goes quiet. At this point, you can rinse it in distilled water. Only do this in a Corelle or Corningware dish (with a lid if possible) as Pyrex might shatter and metal bowls could deposit white metal on the ingot due to galvanic reactions. You're welcome.
I never get tired of watching your videos. I really love the color of the gold in solution. And while you didn't boil it down this time I have always been amazed by how much gold can be in so little solution. I can't imagine how it would feel to pick up a couple hundred milliliters of solution with ounces of gold in it. It would have to be so difficult to process the weight vs the amount
Always a pleasure to watch your videos man. You and another youtuber are the only guys i watch regularly on youtube. Good work as always. I wish we could go for a beer. I bet we'd have amazing conversations. The silver melts like plastic. Amazing.
Absolutely awesome video and great to see you testing assumptions - it was in the back of my mind "what is the condenser actually doing?" There is no substitution for collecting data and challenging your assumptions, but it sure isn't easy to do. The outcome you have might mean that not very much nitric is evaporating. I still think the new setup is absolutely amazing - being able to load an titrate each charge of nitric is great so you don't have to do it by hand. The condenser might be something you only need in certain circumstances - it's a great thing to have.
I think a better way to save some nitric acid is to bubble the orange fumes through a column of water. The nitrogen oxides will combine with the water and create a dilute acid. You can add junk silver to this and the acid will be used up immediately after creation. The amount of dissolved silver will give you an idea of how much acid has been saved.
Hi Sreetips, To get the best return on your NOx fumes IMO is directing them all to a Concentrated Lye & water trap which converts the NaOH into NaNO3 and NaNO2. Use Sulfuric Acid to convert those salts to nitric again and repeat. Your sub product will be Na2SO4. NO2 + NaOH = NaNO2 + NaNO3 + H2O 2NaNO3 + H2SO4 = 2HNO3+ Na2SO4
You are welcome. The reflux system has its’ purpose but the additional time needed to set up, tend, disassemble and then prepare for storage to await the next refining might be a detriment to productivity. No doubt it brings a “mad scientist” aura to the lab though. I thoroughly enjoyed this video production and appreciate the great editing(as always). Thank you Sir!👍👍🤟
Your videos have many satisfying moments but by far my favorite part is the real time melting of the gold and then the sturling silver additions. Something so pleasing about meting spoons and jewelry into a liquid haha!
I think he is trying to show that there are many different ways to dissolve and recover the gold using silver as a sort of catalyst, there is no need to re-invent the wheel, both methods are sound, but the simple one is best, I am not sure that the feeling he describes when he holds the gold bar is purely related to it's monetary value or there is something magical in a cold lifeless ingot of metal, but in my insane world these chemical reactions that are shown have a way of calming me down and gives me something to think about, like the reflux side the fumes condense and run back down into the boiling flask, where as the other method more escapes to air but most hit the loose cover plate and drip down back into the beaker as well. I don't think any gold is lost to air that vents out the work hood, plus his trips to the places he gets the material from are fun, thank you Sreetips
I was surprised that you combined the gold after the nitric acid boils. It have been interesting to see if one method was more efficient regarding the yield too. Either way nice video.
1. Thank you very much for showing Nitric efficiency on my request. 2. This is the first time when you filtered the Chloroauric acid, it was crystal clear. Normally it takes filtering twice or thrice to get such clear liquid. 3. This is the first time you got a spectacular gold bar with single refining.
I have used Soxhlets thousands of times to extract plant material. But I remember old academics using a Soxhlet for inorganic analysis. Metal and other materials analysis. I’m semi retired now, but if I go back in the lab, I will indeed do a video. I will use some pieces of copper as a “control”. I predict that they will dissolve like butter in the Soxhlet. I’ll do it in the fumehood obviously. 👍👍
That would be awesome. But make sure and alloy the copper with gold first. I use silver because I refine silver also. The additional silver reduces the gold concentration in the alloy down around 6k gold (25% pure gold, 75% silver and copper and zinc). The goal is to remove nearly all the silver and base metals leaving just the pure gold behind for further refining.
Damn, that's a fat-ass pile of gold. Nicely done, as always. Btw, mbmmllc, a mining channel, is looking for collaborators. I saw your name mentioned in the comments. Could be interesting.
One day, I would like to visit Jason. He is a miner. I’m a refiner. He finds the gold and gets it out of the ground, which is fascinating. All the gold that I refine has already been mined, extracted, and purified (by large refiners) and alloyed to make jewelry. I’m an “urban miner” because we find gold that’s already above the ground.
@@sreetips - it would be awesome if Jason could be convinced to send you a sample from the cons off his shaker table. Those should be relatively high purity. It would be neat to see how the refining process (or experience) differs for that type of material.
Morning Gunny! Well I now have a huge set of distillation glassware. All thanks to your, "Mad Scienctist" video. Now, i have to learn how to best use it all! I thought that you'd be interested. I took some Silver into my local Brokerage here in Toledo. I had it poured into approximately 3 ounce coins, 4 pieces total. The gentleman waiting on me looked them over and then took them to his Xray Spectrometer. He measured one, scratched his head a bit. Took it over to a work bench and filed a corner. He seemed satisfied with what he saw. He returned to his Xray device and placed the coin he had already measured, back inside to reanalize it. He got his reading and without turning his head to look at me he queried, "Where did you get this"? "Well, I refined it from scrap and Sterling". I was starting to get worried, Gunny! "You refined it"? "Yep. In my laboratory". " Are you looking to sell"? "Not so much today. I just wanted to get it evaluated. See how my processes work". A bead of sweat rolled down my balled head into my eye! "Why, is there a problem with it"? "No! No problem at all! In my 18 years here, this is the first time I've measured scrap Silver and had it come up 99.99 Fine Silver"! At the finish, I gave him all my wife's information, (my hobby, her business), and he set her up as a vendor! I showed him one of your videos and gave you all the credit! He's even willing to sell me scap gold, low Karate weight, to refine! Pretty cool all said and done! I owe all praise to you, Senior Chief! What a fantastic hobby! Thank you! You greatest FAN! Wade
The reflux condenser needs about 2 minutes of gas residence time for the recovery of acid. I’ve designed these units before. What you have is in the 30 second range, so you aren’t recovering a significant portion of the NOx to nitric acid. Chemical engineer here.
@@sreetipsNO has to oxidize to NO2, it’s the NO2 that makes the nitric acid, but the red NOx from heavy metal dissolution is mostly NO. My design at INL gets rid of the NOx plume from the dissolver.
When it comes to trying to get your gold powder into the crucible, I highly recommend this: Take a plastic syringe of the appropriate size, (Say 75Ml for this case) and carefully cut the tip off so that the plunger can come straight down and just pass/ exit the other end. With the plunger removed, hold the tube vertical while applying slight pressure to a dish or paper towel, use a spoon or whichever tool of your choice, and put the gold into the syring until 75% full. Using the plunger, press down onto the gold compressing it into a hard cake, pop it out of the syring extending plunger all the way out, and gently pick up and place the gold cake into your crucible. You would be able do this 2 Or 3 times with the amount of material you have and would greatly reduce volume, ease of transport, and melting time. Plus, a compacted gold cake would look awesome on your channel 😊
Thank you very much for your videos. I've been watching at least 20 hours of your content by now. I'm thinking about doing refining myself but sadly I don't have the time or the structure for it at the present moment :(
Fantastic result and loved the experimentation on reflux. The yield you got is just great. If you were to estimate the amount of gold transferred to your Gold Refining Waste contrainer, would you say it was much less than a gram of gold?
G'day Sreetips. I have been watching your channel for quite a while, and today I came up with a question when you said that the silver crystal is a byproduct from your gold refining ... Why can't you use the cement silver to enquart your gold scrap, since you will me using nitric boils to remove it all anyway? Thanks~
I could use cement silver, but it’s not recommended. Karat gold (especially white gold) carries palladium (and some platinum). These metals will follow the silver and tend to accumulate in the cement silver if I use it over and over to inquart the karat gold. High concentrations of platinum group metals (especially palladium) in the cement silver could cause problems in the silver cell if pgm concentrations are allowed to become elevated. Plus, I refine silver so it’s best to use sterling to inquart the gold, since the first step in refining silver is to dissolve it in nitric acid anyway.
HNO3 is ionized in water. Nitric loves water and does not volatilize when stripped by steam bubbles at normal (non fuming nitric) concentrations. Your condenser was just refluxing water.
Refluxing nitric doesn't save much acid, because the reaction without the presence of peroxide results in at least half NITROUS acid formation. It needs that additional oxidation from peroxide to kick the favored reaction towards producing mostly NITRATE ion.
@@sreetips I've never seen it done with refluxing. Usually, the NO2 is outgassed through one of those little aquarium bubbler stones into another vessel with 20% or higher H2O2, and then the recovered nitric is distilled later. The same this can be done with SO2 gas. It won't work with chlorine from HCl. Bubbling chlorine gas through water just chlorinates the water and makes it smell like a swimming pool.
This was so fascinating to see the comparison between both rigs and that the new rig doesn't necessarily save on acid but it's certainly gives an "alchemy" feel to the process and adds an element of mystery (love it). Another amazing video and result. 👍🏻
I figured that there would be a little excess nitric. But I also know that I only added 60 to 70 milliliters of nitric so it probably wasn’t too bad. Just think if I had used 200ml nitric (4 to 1 Aqua Regia)! I’d probably still be out in my shop cleaning up the gold chloride solution from the inside of my fume hood.
Always have your condensor filled from the bottom and drained from the top, means even if your flow rate drops for any reason, the condensor will always have some water in it at least.
@sreetips capture into a different vessel, maybe? I think it might be so dilute as to not be of much value in metallurgy, only in the harm it could do to your lungs.
@@sreetips Doesn't the Nitric Acid get consumed making Silver Nitrate, and off-gassing the Nitric Oxide? I'd think if it was going to make a difference, it would be with the Aqua Regia boils to dissolve the gold.
Hello Mrs and Mr Sreetips. Simply love to wake up to a gold refining from the best.🙂Sir..You filming and produce this videos so exellent to. Thank you🔥 Have a wonderful weekend buddy. God bless you🙏
Love your channel. Thank you. I noticed when you went to the market you had a "test kit", would you do a video on that? What's in it and why? Thank you again
after you have enquarted and run it through nitric, i really want to know the texture of those gold balls. can you take one out and hit it with a hammer lightly to see if it crumbles or flattens? I am so curious.
After the nitric boils, those gold balls are like gold sponge. I need to get up with one of the professors at the college and get them to look at one of those gold balls, broke open, under their SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) so we can see the honey comb structure inside.
To answer your question I have some gold sponge from sreetips. You can squish it with your fingers and it feels kind of like clay at first but then it hardens as you compact it. It's crazy how soft it is. If you hit it with a hammer it might crumble some but it would probably mostly flatten and harden
I suggest a Soxhlet apparatus. Load the Soxhlet with impure gold and reflux conc nitric acid through it. You can leave it on with a chiller feeding your condenser. Best wishes, Professor Simon Gibbons 👍
I looked at that and concluded that it’s not right for parting silver and base metals from inquarted gold. Immersion in the dilute solvent is the way to go here.
You can collect the fumes through hydrogen peroxide and that will adsorb the nitrogen dioxide making a week nitric acid you can reuse instead of the reflux method.
Based on my experience, and my study of what the soxhlet extractor does, I don’t think it’s a good fit for what I’m doing. The inquarted gold reacts better when it’s submerged in hot dilute nitric.
Hello . So I am assuming you just need propane for the mold heater correct?thankyou as always for the great video. Interesting to see a side by side comparison...just a beaker and a heater seems to do fine .even though the condenser looks way cooler lol..thx again
Looks like your funnel is trapping most of your gasses. If you add a side neck above your center flask and attach the funnel, then your gasses will rise up into the condenser. Just a thought.
Great comparison between reflux and no reflux. Better than I expected when I suggested this a few weeks ago. One question remains though. How much nitric was left in the liquids that you poured off? Can you dissolve more sterling with liquid number two in your next step of handling your byproducts?
I didn’t see a difference between the reflux and the cover beaker. I thought that the reflux would have used less nitric. The reflux looks neat, but it’s a pain to work with.
@@sreetips I mean, was there maybe a difference in strength (acidity) between the remaining liquids? Is there more left over nitric in liquid 2 than in liquid 1? I don’t really see that it will make very much of a difference. As you clearly showed in your experiment, there was no significant difference during these nitric boils, other than how easy or difficult they were to handle. If there is a difference in left over nitric, it should be possible to show in your next step of the silver refining. When you use the spent acid, with left over nitric, to dissolve some extra sterling.
The beauty of the system is that after removal of the silver in the inquart, You could reflux pure water which will wash the precious metal in the Soxhlet. This will make it acid free and clean as only pure water would condense.
A chemical engineer said that the length of the reflux I’m using is insufficient. Said it needed to be at least four times longer. But I don’t have that much room in my fume hood.
@ a longer reflux condenser is always good, but if you have a recirculating cooler (best one is Julabo), you can add antifreeze to the water and run it at 4 Celsius. Will condense any vapours. We could condense dimethylformamide bp = 153 Celsius. I think nitric acid boils at 83 Celsius so no problems. 👍
Antifreeze for the coolant. Prestone has bright green antifreeze. That would look very neat. I’d fill the reservoir with antifreeze coolant, then put it in a container of ice and use salt (like an ice cream maker) to get the temp down low. Since the cooling loop is closed, none of the antifreeze would come in contact with any of the valuable products in the setup.
One of the first rules I learnt about using condensers, if distilling, then coldest water goes at the end but when in reflux the coldest water at the start (of the condenser).
Dam Steetips I'm always astounded watching you work!! I will never get a chance to hold a 6 Oz of PURE GOLD!. LOL Man... to watch a crystal clear bright and clean beautiful solution puff into a cloud of metal by adding a sulfur compound "smb" is amazing. Love it!! Maybe someday, I'll take your teachings and put them to work? Just have to get all the safety equipment and a very good fume hood. And hopefully I don't go broke trying.. lol
12:59 shame that flow didn’t work. A countercurrent exchange would be most efficient in heat exchange and condensation. But I loved the side by side. Great comparison. Certainly the cumbersome factor is not insignificant. Even transfer out of the reaction flask seemed to be a nightmare with potential for loss.
I think this experiment shows that most of your "nitric acid fumes" are not pure nitric acid gas, but are just by-products of the reaction with gold. Therefore, the condensed liquids coming back down into the pot are not saving you much pure nitric acid. Old method works just fine.
I saw another channels video where the guy slightly tapped the ingot mold while he poured and it created some really amazing wave lines in the top of the ingot
Always flow condenser water from the bottom to the top. When distilling, that is opposite the flow of distillate for more efficient cooling but with a reflux condenser you can't do that. it's just the way it is :)
Did I dream or did I see a video uploaded about 19-17 hours ago but its gone? I woke up ( I am in Europe) saw the upload and went back to sleep feeling happy about having something to watch in the morning 😅
That is how the Soxhlet should function. The condensed pure nitric will drip down onto the inquart. The nitric will still be warm and as it is pure, the extraction efficiency is higher. Fresh nitric recycled.
I’ve looked into that. The setup of the soxhlet is not a good fit for this reaction. Those pieces of inquarted gold must remain submerged in the hot dilute nitric. The Soxhlet extraction is used when the desired compound (the silver and base metals in the inquarted gold) has a limited solubility in a solvent, and the impurity (the pure gold) is insoluble in that solvent. It allows for unmonitored and unmanaged operation while efficiently recycling a small amount of solvent to dissolve a larger amount of material (source: Wikipedia). None of the professional refiners that I learned from ever used one.
the advantage of the reflux is that less of the deadly nitric fumes escape into the surrounding environment of the apparatus, but i do not know if you are greasing your joints at all to give a more gas-tight seal in your reflux setup
yeah that's what i meant by "grease" some type of acid in order to form a liquid seal between the walls of the attachment and the end that it's sitting in
Hello sreetips. May I ask what camera you are using? Every episode of your video is clean. Can you show the link where you bought the camera? Of course if this is not problem. I often have problems with the image, with focusing the image, because I just use my phone camera. Thanks in advance 🙂
I use an iphone11 for all my videos. It’s an older phone but it has the best camera I’ve ever used. The iphone11 quit working a couple years ago (but the camera still works fine) so I bought an iphone14 and the camera on it is junk compared to the 11. They (Apple) have reduced quality in their phones. They used to be unbeatable. If my iphone14 quits working, I’m switching to android. Apple has gone done the tubes. Thankfully, the iphone11 quit working as a phone, but the camera still works fine.
At first, I could use the video files from my iPhones14 even though the camera wasn’t that good. At least I could use the 14 to get footage if I had the 11 in use as Timelapse. But then, after doing an update on the 14, the video files were no longer compatible with my PC. I’ll never buy another Apple product. They lost a customer when they did that.
@@sreetips Thanks a lot sreetips. Your phone has a good camera. The quality of each video episode is excellent 👌 I thought you were using some kind of professional camera, like the ones they use in television. Now I know that the iPhone camera is much better than the Samsung I use 🙂Thanks again.
Plumbers teflon tap works better on the joints than sulfuric acid. Also, it is resistant to the nitric. The reflux doesn’t seem to improve efficiency at the temperatures you’re using.
Would be interesting as the NO2 would condense as well and react with water in the Soxhlet thimble. No risk of boil over as the condenser is above the Soxhlet. Yes, it will work.
Question, why do you use blow torches to melt the gold instead of a furnace crucible set-up? Just curious. Also, have you ever done an aluminum refining video? I couldnt find anything but you do have a lot of videos lol.
I use map gas (yellow cylinder) and oxy/acetylene because they are much faster and easier (for me) than an electric or gas furnace. I don’t have any experience with aluminum.
I was under the impression that the new method you used would somehow recycle the nitric acid and be a more effective, more economical way of doing it, but it was a great experiment to find out.
Hello streetips big fan of yours 🎉 , I'm just wondering if how about I smelt directly the plated pins from ewaste then do the inquartation process w/copper or silver, can this be done? Thank you in advance 🙂😊
No. The goal of inquartation it create an alloy that is 25% pure gold and 75% base metals and silver. If you melt the escrap, then the tiny amount of gold will get lost and you’ll end up with nothing.
That indeed is a spectacular bar of gold, sir :) Also, you might have gotten different results with the reflux method, had you circulated the nitric acid with a little pump into the flask rather than dripping it in and condensing the fumes, in my opinion. Either way, the result is beautiful, as you said :)
Is adding all that silver to the 24k necessary? It's been refined already so couldn't you melt it separately and add the pieces to the post-nitric boils and then create aqua regia from there?
Unfortunately, yes it will. That ceramic wool was inadvertently coated with borax. The molten borax will stick to the crucible and the wool regardless if there anything in between them.
Whats your thoughts on dissolving your SMB in distilled water before adding it to your solution? I do adding my opinion it helps keeping it from running away on ya
Nice bar. What was gained by using the reflux/flask method? What did the condenser capture? Just curious. I thought you were gonna refine separately to see if there would be a difference in yield.
Theoretically, reducing would condense red fumes back into nitric and drip it back down into the reaction so it could dissolve more silver and base metals from the Inquarted gold. There should have been an equal amount of gold in each one. So the yield would be the same for each one. Refluxing during nitric boils (or not) would not affect the gold yield. I was trying to measure the difference in nitric consumption between reflux and non-reflux reactions.
I'll buy the little diamons. They must be cheap because they probably have (gasp) soot from the torches and gold "contaminating" them. :) Seriously though, I love your vids. I think I am watching alchemy.
That was cool. I wonder if there would have been a difference in weight between the two containers of gold if you dried them after the nitric boils? Are you going to continue to use that new device?
This is what experimentation is about. Making a hypothesis and testing it. Turns out, your reflux isn't as efficient as advertised, but you will ultimately save time by doing as you always have.
I’m studying chemistry in college and your videos give me the motivation to continue, even when it gets tough.
Keep going ,never give up or in,when qualified, you can work anywhere in the world for yourself .
How are you purifying your gold?
Well, first I mix it with some silver.... :)
Makes no sense at all until you learn about aqua regia.
Keep on with your studies.
The world needs people who understand chemistry.
Good luck I had trouble with high school chemistry in the 80s.
@@thorild69also you don't need a degree to know what you are doing and be an expert. I trust a medic EMT then a PhD.
I feel chemistry will be illegal here soon and the ones that do know will be highly valued in the future ..near future i never went to school for it but every thing I do know was self taught by watching sreetips and I can honestly say I have a 97.8% recovery rate by weight by watching his videos i can only imagine how tough it is but hang in there it will pay off soon enough
I remember my first poured gold bar , it’s a magical feeling to hold a chunk of pure gold in your hand.
Nothing like it. It’s pure generational wealth.
It never gets old, seeing that molten bar solidify and the first look at the shiny surface. It's like magic. Thanks, sreetips.
Great looking bar you ended up with there. One of your best. Nice work.
Sreetips is at it again!!! You’re just a LOST treasure to watch!! Thank you so much for your Chanel!!
Thank you!
A great presentation of the two methods side-by-side for comparison....and, as always, a stunning result, thanks sreetips😁👍👍👍
Once again.......absolutely LOVE the new rig!!!
Once again Sreetips, thank you for the knowledge and content, I have learned so much from your videos. Keep up the good work.
That's your prettiest pour yet, beautiful.
Love watching your work, huge fan. It’s mesmerizing to see that pure gold like that.
Quick tip: During the melt phase, base metal impurities and borax residue tend to form a tough invisible oxide layer on the ingot surface. Residual graphite from the mold can contribute to this. Quenching the finished ingot in water will partially dissolve this 'skin', but not completely. I discovered long ago that quenching the ingot in hydrochloric acid while it's still at red heat will completely dissolve any surface contamination without attacking the gold, leaving a much brighter gold finish than if it were quenched in water alone.
When quenching in HCl, the ingot will initially seem not to react, almost as if it were cold. That's due to the Leidenfrost effect creating a bubble of hot HCl gas around the ingot. Within 5-10 seconds the acid will rapidly begin to boil as it begins to contact the still hot ingot. This boiling will increase in intensity for a few seconds, until it abruptly goes quiet. At this point, you can rinse it in distilled water. Only do this in a Corelle or Corningware dish (with a lid if possible) as Pyrex might shatter and metal bowls could deposit white metal on the ingot due to galvanic reactions.
You're welcome.
I have always loved watching your videos. Thank you for taking the time to educate us all!
I never get tired of watching your videos. I really love the color of the gold in solution. And while you didn't boil it down this time I have always been amazed by how much gold can be in so little solution. I can't imagine how it would feel to pick up a couple hundred milliliters of solution with ounces of gold in it. It would have to be so difficult to process the weight vs the amount
The bar of gold looks pretty and amazing 👏 fantastic job 👏 👍 👌
Always a pleasure to watch your videos man. You and another youtuber are the only guys i watch regularly on youtube. Good work as always. I wish we could go for a beer. I bet we'd have amazing conversations. The silver melts like plastic. Amazing.
Absolutely awesome video and great to see you testing assumptions - it was in the back of my mind "what is the condenser actually doing?" There is no substitution for collecting data and challenging your assumptions, but it sure isn't easy to do. The outcome you have might mean that not very much nitric is evaporating.
I still think the new setup is absolutely amazing - being able to load an titrate each charge of nitric is great so you don't have to do it by hand. The condenser might be something you only need in certain circumstances - it's a great thing to have.
I agree
You are a real Alchemist 😅…or true Chemist. Love your videos. Very interesting.
That's one beautiful bar, great work Mr. Sree !!
I think a better way to save some nitric acid is to bubble the orange fumes through a column of water. The nitrogen oxides will combine with the water and create a dilute acid. You can add junk silver to this and the acid will be used up immediately after creation. The amount of dissolved silver will give you an idea of how much acid has been saved.
Hi Sreetips,
To get the best return on your NOx fumes IMO is directing them all to a Concentrated Lye & water trap which converts the NaOH into NaNO3 and NaNO2. Use Sulfuric Acid to convert those salts to nitric again and repeat.
Your sub product will be Na2SO4.
NO2 + NaOH = NaNO2 + NaNO3 + H2O
2NaNO3 + H2SO4 = 2HNO3+ Na2SO4
You are welcome. The reflux system has its’ purpose but the additional time needed to set up, tend, disassemble and then prepare for storage to await the next refining might be a detriment to productivity. No doubt it brings a “mad scientist” aura to the lab though. I thoroughly enjoyed this video production and appreciate the great editing(as always). Thank you Sir!👍👍🤟
I think it can work if I fully charge the addition funnel with nitric instead of dosing 100ml at a time. Let it reflux longer.
Your videos have many satisfying moments but by far my favorite part is the real time melting of the gold and then the sturling silver additions. Something so pleasing about meting spoons and jewelry into a liquid haha!
There’s something primal about working with molten gold and silver.
@@sreetips that is probably why I like watching bigstackD also. Molten metal just scratches that primal itch in my brain. Thank you for what you do!
I think he is trying to show that there are many different ways to dissolve and recover the gold using silver as a sort of catalyst, there is no need to re-invent the wheel, both methods are sound, but the simple one is best, I am not sure that the feeling he describes when he holds the gold bar is purely related to it's monetary value or there is something magical in a cold lifeless ingot of metal, but in my insane world these chemical reactions that are shown have a way of calming me down and gives me something to think about, like the reflux side the fumes condense and run back down into the boiling flask, where as the other method more escapes to air but most hit the loose cover plate and drip down back into the beaker as well. I don't think any gold is lost to air that vents out the work hood, plus his trips to the places he gets the material from are fun, thank you Sreetips
*sreetips* Bravo well done, thank-you sir for taking the time to bring us along. GOD Bless.
I was surprised that you combined the gold after the nitric acid boils. It have been interesting to see if one method was more efficient regarding the yield too. Either way nice video.
There’s an equal amount of gold in both containers. The nitric boils won’t affect the yield.
Sreetips is the "Bob Ross" of refining.
Its so crazy how the gold appears after you put in the SMB
thats a great experiment! i always wondered if recycling nox gases would improve acid yield
1. Thank you very much for showing Nitric efficiency on my request.
2. This is the first time when you filtered the Chloroauric acid, it was crystal clear. Normally it takes filtering twice or thrice to get such clear liquid.
3. This is the first time you got a spectacular gold bar with single refining.
Nice, thank you for the suggestion.
Those slurpy straws always make me chuckle a bit
Those are an actual piece of lab-ware. They are disposable spatulas and they come in very handy.
Goooood evening from central Florida! Hope everyone has a great night! That's a BIG bar of AU!
My buddy.
Thank you so much.
Have a wonderful weekend. God..Bless my good friend🙂🙏
Great way to wake up coffee and sreetips t.v.
Thanks
@dustinscroggins3382 🙂🔥
@@Arne-ns2mw Thank you Arne! Hope you and your family are well and happy!
@@dustinscroggins3382 absolutely! Have a great one dustin!
I can watch these all day. Amazing.
I have used Soxhlets thousands of times to extract plant material. But I remember old academics using a Soxhlet for inorganic analysis. Metal and other materials analysis. I’m semi retired now, but if I go back in the lab, I will indeed do a video. I will use some pieces of copper as a “control”. I predict that they will dissolve like butter in the Soxhlet. I’ll do it in the fumehood obviously. 👍👍
That would be awesome. But make sure and alloy the copper with gold first. I use silver because I refine silver also. The additional silver reduces the gold concentration in the alloy down around 6k gold (25% pure gold, 75% silver and copper and zinc). The goal is to remove nearly all the silver and base metals leaving just the pure gold behind for further refining.
Great video absolutely beautiful gold bar thanks for sharing sreetips
Damn, that's a fat-ass pile of gold. Nicely done, as always.
Btw, mbmmllc, a mining channel, is looking for collaborators. I saw your name mentioned in the comments. Could be interesting.
That would be a great collab definitely! I was thinking the same thing.
He's looking for someone to muck a mine tunnel.
@@lger14 Yeah, I still think a colab on what happens after all the mucking is done would be great. Not so much the mucking 🤣
One day, I would like to visit Jason. He is a miner. I’m a refiner. He finds the gold and gets it out of the ground, which is fascinating. All the gold that I refine has already been mined, extracted, and purified (by large refiners) and alloyed to make jewelry. I’m an “urban miner” because we find gold that’s already above the ground.
@@sreetips - it would be awesome if Jason could be convinced to send you a sample from the cons off his shaker table. Those should be relatively high purity. It would be neat to see how the refining process (or experience) differs for that type of material.
Morning Gunny! Well I now have a huge set of distillation glassware. All thanks to your, "Mad Scienctist" video. Now, i have to learn how to best use it all!
I thought that you'd be interested. I took some Silver into my local Brokerage here in Toledo. I had it poured into approximately 3 ounce coins, 4 pieces total.
The gentleman waiting on me looked them over and then took them to his Xray Spectrometer. He measured one, scratched his head a bit. Took it over to a work bench and filed a corner. He seemed satisfied with what he saw.
He returned to his Xray device and placed the coin he had already measured, back inside to reanalize it. He got his reading and without turning his head to look at me he queried, "Where did you get this"? "Well, I refined it from scrap and Sterling". I was starting to get worried, Gunny!
"You refined it"? "Yep. In my laboratory". " Are you looking to sell"? "Not so much today. I just wanted to get it evaluated. See how my processes work". A bead of sweat rolled down my balled head into my eye! "Why, is there a problem with it"? "No! No problem at all! In my 18 years here, this is the first time I've measured scrap Silver and had it come up 99.99 Fine Silver"!
At the finish, I gave him all my wife's information, (my hobby, her business), and he set her up as a vendor! I showed him one of your videos and gave you all the credit!
He's even willing to sell me scap gold, low Karate weight, to refine! Pretty cool all said and done! I owe all praise to you, Senior Chief! What a fantastic hobby! Thank you!
You greatest FAN!
Wade
Now that’s how you make connections!
The reflux condenser needs about 2 minutes of gas residence time for the recovery of acid. I’ve designed these units before. What you have is in the 30 second range, so you aren’t recovering a significant portion of the NOx to nitric acid. Chemical engineer here.
I need four of those in series
@@sreetipsNO has to oxidize to NO2, it’s the NO2 that makes the nitric acid, but the red NOx from heavy metal dissolution is mostly NO. My design at INL gets rid of the NOx plume from the dissolver.
Another great video sreetips, love it.
When it comes to trying to get your gold powder into the crucible, I highly recommend this:
Take a plastic syringe of the appropriate size, (Say 75Ml for this case) and carefully cut the tip off so that the plunger can come straight down and just pass/ exit the other end.
With the plunger removed, hold the tube vertical while applying slight pressure to a dish or paper towel, use a spoon or whichever tool of your choice, and put the gold into the syring until 75% full. Using the plunger, press down onto the gold compressing it into a hard cake, pop it out of the syring extending plunger all the way out, and gently pick up and place the gold cake into your crucible.
You would be able do this 2
Or 3 times with the amount of material you have and would greatly reduce volume, ease of transport, and melting time. Plus, a compacted gold cake would look awesome on your channel 😊
Ok, thank you
Thank you very much for your videos. I've been watching at least 20 hours of your content by now. I'm thinking about doing refining myself but sadly I don't have the time or the structure for it at the present moment :(
Well there you go, a result. Well worth doing the experiment I think though. I thought for sure it would have helped. Great stuff 👍👍
It was disappointing that it didn’t yield the result I had hoped for. But maybe I did something wrong.
Fantastic result and loved the experimentation on reflux. The yield you got is just great. If you were to estimate the amount of gold transferred to your Gold Refining Waste contrainer, would you say it was much less than a gram of gold?
Yes
G'day Sreetips. I have been watching your channel for quite a while, and today I came up with a question when you said that the silver crystal is a byproduct from your gold refining ... Why can't you use the cement silver to enquart your gold scrap, since you will me using nitric boils to remove it all anyway?
Thanks~
I think it is because you don't know the % silver concentration of the cement silver while in comparison you do know the % silver of the sterliing.
I could use cement silver, but it’s not recommended. Karat gold (especially white gold) carries palladium (and some platinum). These metals will follow the silver and tend to accumulate in the cement silver if I use it over and over to inquart the karat gold. High concentrations of platinum group metals (especially palladium) in the cement silver could cause problems in the silver cell if pgm concentrations are allowed to become elevated. Plus, I refine silver so it’s best to use sterling to inquart the gold, since the first step in refining silver is to dissolve it in nitric acid anyway.
@@sreetips Ahh, that explains it. Those pesky PGMs ...
HNO3 is ionized in water. Nitric loves water and does not volatilize when stripped by steam bubbles at normal (non fuming nitric) concentrations. Your condenser was just refluxing water.
That’s what I observed
Refluxing nitric doesn't save much acid, because the reaction without the presence of peroxide results in at least half NITROUS acid formation. It needs that additional oxidation from peroxide to kick the favored reaction towards producing mostly NITRATE ion.
So I’ll try again but add some hydrogen peroxide to the reaction.
@@sreetips I've never seen it done with refluxing. Usually, the NO2 is outgassed through one of those little aquarium bubbler stones into another vessel with 20% or higher H2O2, and then the recovered nitric is distilled later.
The same this can be done with SO2 gas.
It won't work with chlorine from HCl. Bubbling chlorine gas through water just chlorinates the water and makes it smell like a swimming pool.
This was so fascinating to see the comparison between both rigs and that the new rig doesn't necessarily save on acid but it's certainly gives an "alchemy" feel to the process and adds an element of mystery (love it). Another amazing video and result. 👍🏻
I think it can work if I can use a greater amount of nitric and leave it to reflux longer.
When it started boiling WITH ice in it during the smb i was nervous of a boil over intense precipitation this time glad u handled it like a champ
I figured that there would be a little excess nitric. But I also know that I only added 60 to 70 milliliters of nitric so it probably wasn’t too bad. Just think if I had used 200ml nitric (4 to 1 Aqua Regia)! I’d probably still be out in my shop cleaning up the gold chloride solution from the inside of my fume hood.
Another great video Sreetips. Hope you and Mrs Sreetips are well. 😎👍
Doing well, thank you
Always have your condensor filled from the bottom and drained from the top, means even if your flow rate drops for any reason, the condensor will always have some water in it at least.
Good point.
Incredible! When you were turning your gold bar back and forth I was temporarily blinded by the gold flashes! 😂. Brilliant! no pun intended
Well, that answers that question without any doubts!
It was a disappointing outcome. I was hoping it would increase efficiency. Bummer.
@sreetips capture into a different vessel, maybe? I think it might be so dilute as to not be of much value in metallurgy, only in the harm it could do to your lungs.
@@sreetips Doesn't the Nitric Acid get consumed making Silver Nitrate, and off-gassing the Nitric Oxide? I'd think if it was going to make a difference, it would be with the Aqua Regia boils to dissolve the gold.
Yes, but the red gas coming off is nitrogen dioxide. I’m trying convert it back into nitric instead of allowing it to escape up the exhaust stack.
@sreetips just add water, I believe!
Hello Mrs and Mr Sreetips.
Simply love to wake up to a gold refining from the best.🙂Sir..You filming and produce this videos so exellent to. Thank you🔥
Have a wonderful weekend buddy. God bless you🙏
Excellent Arne. I wonder what God has for us today. All the best to you and your family.
@sreetips My good friend. Thank you for your kind and comfort words🙂You have already make my day buddy.
Say hei to Mrs Sreetips Sir.
Love your channel. Thank you. I noticed when you went to the market you had a "test kit", would you do a video on that? What's in it and why? Thank you again
ruclips.net/video/gk8Vgv_HFWA/видео.htmlfeature=shared
Testing karat gold with test acids. I thought I had a video like that already posted.
after you have enquarted and run it through nitric, i really want to know the texture of those gold balls. can you take one out and hit it with a hammer lightly to see if it crumbles or flattens? I am so curious.
After the nitric boils, those gold balls are like gold sponge. I need to get up with one of the professors at the college and get them to look at one of those gold balls, broke open, under their SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) so we can see the honey comb structure inside.
@@sreetips That would be great to see. :)
Would turn to dust most likely
To answer your question I have some gold sponge from sreetips. You can squish it with your fingers and it feels kind of like clay at first but then it hardens as you compact it. It's crazy how soft it is. If you hit it with a hammer it might crumble some but it would probably mostly flatten and harden
@@adamtheninjasmith2985 If you hit it with a hammer it probably would start looking like gold foil which can be incredibly thin.
very nice bar Sree
I suggest a Soxhlet apparatus. Load the Soxhlet with impure gold and reflux conc nitric acid through it. You can leave it on with a chiller feeding your condenser. Best wishes, Professor Simon Gibbons 👍
I looked at that and concluded that it’s not right for parting silver and base metals from inquarted gold. Immersion in the dilute solvent is the way to go here.
Short ending 😅. Great pour💪
You can collect the fumes through hydrogen peroxide and that will adsorb the nitrogen dioxide making a week nitric acid you can reuse instead of the reflux method.
The good thing about the Soxhlet is that it automatically empties and fresh nitric is always doing the extraction. 👍
Based on my experience, and my study of what the soxhlet extractor does, I don’t think it’s a good fit for what I’m doing. The inquarted gold reacts better when it’s submerged in hot dilute nitric.
beautiful as always. remind me why you don't use your already purified silver to enquart the gold?
Because it’s already been through the silver cell. Using pure silver to inquart would be taking a step backwards.
That 2nd degree Masonic pendant. Thats worth more than its value in gold to some. Great video regardless.
Hello . So I am assuming you just need propane for the mold heater correct?thankyou as always for the great video. Interesting to see a side by side comparison...just a beaker and a heater seems to do fine .even though the condenser looks way cooler lol..thx again
I use map gas (yellow cylinder) for heating the mold. But I have used propane to heat the mold.
Looks like your funnel is trapping most of your gasses. If you add a side neck above your center flask and attach the funnel, then your gasses will rise up into the condenser. Just a thought.
Great comparison between reflux and no reflux. Better than I expected when I suggested this a few weeks ago. One question remains though. How much nitric was left in the liquids that you poured off? Can you dissolve more sterling with liquid number two in your next step of handling your byproducts?
I didn’t see a difference between the reflux and the cover beaker. I thought that the reflux would have used less nitric. The reflux looks neat, but it’s a pain to work with.
@@sreetips I mean, was there maybe a difference in strength (acidity) between the remaining liquids? Is there more left over nitric in liquid 2 than in liquid 1?
I don’t really see that it will make very much of a difference. As you clearly showed in your experiment, there was no significant difference during these nitric boils, other than how easy or difficult they were to handle. If there is a difference in left over nitric, it should be possible to show in your next step of the silver refining. When you use the spent acid, with left over nitric, to dissolve some extra sterling.
The beauty of the system is that after removal of the silver in the inquart, You could reflux pure water which will wash the precious metal in the Soxhlet. This will make it acid free and clean as only pure water would condense.
A chemical engineer said that the length of the reflux I’m using is insufficient. Said it needed to be at least four times longer. But I don’t have that much room in my fume hood.
I don’t think I’d have enough room for the soxhlet apparatus.
@ a longer reflux condenser is always good, but if you have a recirculating cooler (best one is Julabo), you can add antifreeze to the water and run it at 4 Celsius. Will condense any vapours. We could condense dimethylformamide bp = 153 Celsius. I think nitric acid boils at 83 Celsius so no problems. 👍
Antifreeze for the coolant. Prestone has bright green antifreeze. That would look very neat. I’d fill the reservoir with antifreeze coolant, then put it in a container of ice and use salt (like an ice cream maker) to get the temp down low. Since the cooling loop is closed, none of the antifreeze would come in contact with any of the valuable products in the setup.
Excellent! I was wondering this very question ever since you use the reflux last video. 👏👏👍👍
One of the first rules I learnt about using condensers, if distilling, then coldest water goes at the end but when in reflux the coldest water at the start (of the condenser).
Youre gonna have the NWO after you for melting down that Mason pendant 🤣
Dam Steetips I'm always astounded watching you work!! I will never get a chance to hold a 6 Oz of PURE GOLD!. LOL Man... to watch a crystal clear bright and clean beautiful solution puff into a cloud of metal by adding a sulfur compound "smb" is amazing. Love it!! Maybe someday, I'll take your teachings and put them to work? Just have to get all the safety equipment and a very good fume hood. And hopefully I don't go broke trying.. lol
Thank you!
Awesome video, thank you 😊
It might be more cumbersome to not use the beaker but it definitely looks cooler and a bit more entertaining. 👍
12:59 shame that flow didn’t work. A countercurrent exchange would be most efficient in heat exchange and condensation. But I loved the side by side. Great comparison. Certainly the cumbersome factor is not insignificant. Even transfer out of the reaction flask seemed to be a nightmare with potential for loss.
I read that as tiny demons flying out and was like what did you get into Sreetips
It was the mason symbol 🤣
I think this experiment shows that most of your "nitric acid fumes" are not pure nitric acid gas, but are just by-products of the reaction with gold. Therefore, the condensed liquids coming back down into the pot are not saving you much pure nitric acid. Old method works just fine.
Agree
I saw another channels video where the guy slightly tapped the ingot mold while he poured and it created some really amazing wave lines in the top of the ingot
Lithic metals video yeah?
Nice!
You’re so awesome, thank you
Thank you!
Beautiful work!
Always flow condenser water from the bottom to the top. When distilling, that is opposite the flow of distillate for more efficient cooling but with a reflux condenser you can't do that. it's just the way it is :)
I could have elevated the bottom outlet hose about the condenser level, but I didn’t have enough hose.
I’d be interested in seeing a refining melt dishs video
Did I dream or did I see a video uploaded about 19-17 hours ago but its gone? I woke up ( I am in Europe) saw the upload and went back to sleep feeling happy about having something to watch in the morning 😅
Ulrich, I have no uploads since last weekend. But I should have one for you this evening.
@@sreetips lol ok it must have been a dream. I think it was a silver cell video
That is how the Soxhlet should function. The condensed pure nitric will drip down onto the inquart. The nitric will still be warm and as it is pure, the extraction efficiency is higher. Fresh nitric recycled.
I’ve looked into that. The setup of the soxhlet is not a good fit for this reaction. Those pieces of inquarted gold must remain submerged in the hot dilute nitric. The Soxhlet extraction is used when the desired compound (the silver and base metals in the inquarted gold) has a limited solubility in a solvent, and the impurity (the pure gold) is insoluble in that solvent. It allows for unmonitored and unmanaged operation while efficiently recycling a small amount of solvent to dissolve a larger amount of material (source: Wikipedia). None of the professional refiners that I learned from ever used one.
the advantage of the reflux is that less of the deadly nitric fumes escape into the surrounding environment of the apparatus, but i do not know if you are greasing your joints at all to give a more gas-tight seal in your reflux setup
I used sulfuric acid instead of grease.
yeah that's what i meant by "grease" some type of acid in order to form a liquid seal between the walls of the attachment and the end that it's sitting in
Hello sreetips. May I ask what camera you are using? Every episode of your video is clean. Can you show the link where you bought the camera? Of course if this is not problem. I often have problems with the image, with focusing the image, because I just use my phone camera. Thanks in advance 🙂
I use an iphone11 for all my videos. It’s an older phone but it has the best camera I’ve ever used. The iphone11 quit working a couple years ago (but the camera still works fine) so I bought an iphone14 and the camera on it is junk compared to the 11. They (Apple) have reduced quality in their phones. They used to be unbeatable. If my iphone14 quits working, I’m switching to android. Apple has gone done the tubes. Thankfully, the iphone11 quit working as a phone, but the camera still works fine.
At first, I could use the video files from my iPhones14 even though the camera wasn’t that good. At least I could use the 14 to get footage if I had the 11 in use as Timelapse. But then, after doing an update on the 14, the video files were no longer compatible with my PC. I’ll never buy another Apple product. They lost a customer when they did that.
@@sreetips Thanks a lot sreetips. Your phone has a good camera. The quality of each video episode is excellent 👌 I thought you were using some kind of professional camera, like the ones they use in television. Now I know that the iPhone camera is much better than the Samsung I use 🙂Thanks again.
If you can find an old iphone11, then that’s the one I would use.
Plumbers teflon tap works better on the joints than sulfuric acid. Also, it is resistant to the nitric. The reflux doesn’t seem to improve efficiency at the temperatures you’re using.
Would be interesting as the NO2 would condense as well and react with water in the Soxhlet thimble. No risk of boil over as the condenser is above the Soxhlet. Yes, it will work.
You should a video and do demonstration.
Question, why do you use blow torches to melt the gold instead of a furnace crucible set-up? Just curious. Also, have you ever done an aluminum refining video? I couldnt find anything but you do have a lot of videos lol.
I use map gas (yellow cylinder) and oxy/acetylene because they are much faster and easier (for me) than an electric or gas furnace. I don’t have any experience with aluminum.
@@sreetips Much appreciated sir!
I was under the impression that the new method you used would somehow recycle the nitric acid and be a more effective, more economical way of doing it, but it was a great experiment to find out.
28:05 the change from gold to blue is fascinating.
Hello streetips big fan of yours 🎉 , I'm just wondering if how about I smelt directly the plated pins from ewaste then do the inquartation process w/copper or silver, can this be done? Thank you in advance 🙂😊
No. The goal of inquartation it create an alloy that is 25% pure gold and 75% base metals and silver. If you melt the escrap, then the tiny amount of gold will get lost and you’ll end up with nothing.
@@sreetipsthank you very much! 😊❤
Big shiney Bar!!!; )
That indeed is a spectacular bar of gold, sir :) Also, you might have gotten different results with the reflux method, had you circulated the nitric acid with a little pump into the flask rather than dripping it in and condensing the fumes, in my opinion. Either way, the result is beautiful, as you said :)
Is adding all that silver to the 24k necessary? It's been refined already so couldn't you melt it separately and add the pieces to the post-nitric boils and then create aqua regia from there?
No, it’s not necessary. Yes it could be added to the Aqua Regia.
Another amazing gold bar steetips try putting and peice of paper under the crucible and it won't stick
Unfortunately, yes it will. That ceramic wool was inadvertently coated with borax. The molten borax will stick to the crucible and the wool regardless if there anything in between them.
Whats your thoughts on dissolving your SMB in distilled water before adding it to your solution? I do adding my opinion it helps keeping it from running away on ya
It creates more waste that must be treated.
Hi Ya & best wishes. SuperB! Thanks for work. Be Happy. Sevastopol/Crimea
Thanks Crimea
Nice bar. What was gained by using the reflux/flask method? What did the condenser capture? Just curious. I thought you were gonna refine separately to see if there would be a difference in yield.
Theoretically, reducing would condense red fumes back into nitric and drip it back down into the reaction so it could dissolve more silver and base metals from the Inquarted gold. There should have been an equal amount of gold in each one. So the yield would be the same for each one. Refluxing during nitric boils (or not) would not affect the gold yield. I was trying to measure the difference in nitric consumption between reflux and non-reflux reactions.
@sreetips ah. But it was the same, if I remember right. Interesting. It's too early in the morning for me to actually listen. Lol
Correct, there wasn’t really any difference in reflux vs non-reflux
Them chemistry kits really help.😎
I'll buy the little diamons. They must be cheap because they probably have (gasp) soot from the torches and gold "contaminating" them. :)
Seriously though, I love your vids. I think I am watching alchemy.
I misspelled a word? Rats.
That was cool. I wonder if there would have been a difference in weight between the two containers of gold if you dried them after the nitric boils? Are you going to continue to use that new device?
Probably, now that I have it.
when you do your nitric boils do you ever test for gold with the stanus test ,it might be interesting to know if any gold has precipitated out
Nitric boils put traces of gold in solution.
This is what experimentation is about. Making a hypothesis and testing it. Turns out, your reflux isn't as efficient as advertised, but you will ultimately save time by doing as you always have.