Precious metal dealers and people who are invested in investing in precious metals can enjoy making a good profit. This is because precious metals will retain their worth even when paper currency loses its value during times of economic hardship. This is because precious metal prices are largely dependent upon the supply and demand of the metal, and demand for precious metal is always high.
Precious metals aren’t just used to make designer jewelry and collector coins. They are also used in various other industries such as the medical and science fields, photography items, engineering equipment and more. Smelting is a technique that is used to separate precious metals from base metals when they are found in different types of equipment. Since the increase for precious metals is currently on the rise, new methods are constantly being created to extract and separate gold, silver, palladium, platinum and other precious metals from waste material and ores. Adsorption is one type of process that is used to separate precious metals from other solutions. Through absorption, palladium can be separated from materials that are made up of copper, nickel and zinc ions.
Firstly, gather all of the materials that you will need to do the separation process, including silica, sodium borate and a tilting furnace.
Place the gold-plated circuit, or any other type of precious metal material you want to separate from other materials, over the tilting furnace and heat it up to temperatures ranging from 1,200 to 1,400 Centigrade.
Next, add the silica and sodium borate. These will work as fluxes in the mixture of the precious metals to help that the slag is formed during the high temperature ranges. Slag is another term for the byproducts created by smelting ore and the vitreous residue that is left after all of the ore has been broken down.
Keep the temperatures up as high as 1,400 C for 90 minutes or more to ensure that all of the metals in the tilting furnace have dissolved into slag.
Keep an eye on the molten gold, or any other type of precious metal that you are currently trying to separate. The molten precious metals will sink deeper into the smelting vessel and the light-weight slag will stay at the top.
Your silica lattice will have been broken down by now by the base metals and it will gradually replace the different ions in the altered lattice structure.
Remove the smelted items, store bullion and other precious metals for further refining or you can keep them as they are.
Separating precious metals is a good technique for many precious metal dealers who want to attain more gold, silver and other precious metals to buy and to sell. Before you do any of the things mentioned in this article, it is wise to do the proper research so that you know that you are doing everything correctly so that you do not harm or injure yourself and get the precious metals safely.