Why Isn't Everyone Doing This?! Easy Smelting Method for Recovering PGMs from Catalytic Converters!! — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00today's video we're going to be smelting down  these catalytic converters try to recover the
2. 0:04platinum padium and rodium and this is the  ceramic honeycomb Matrix and the whole surface
3. 0:10of this ceramic is impregnated with platinum  plaum and rodium that acts as a catalyst so
4. 0:17when your exhaust goes through it burns up the  unburnt fuel and all the other stuff the first
5. 0:22thing we're going to do here is screen this  down to I think this is 16 or 20 mesh we're
6. 0:26looking for maybe 50 g here so I'm going to  add 50 G of anhydrous borax then we'll add 50
7. 0:33g of soda ash and then 25 G of silica sand  now I'm going to add 25 G of bismuth oxide
8. 0:42and this is going to act as our collector metal  I'm going to add some cooking flour the cooking
9. 0:48flour is going to act as carbon and when the  carbon comes in contact with the Bismuth oxide
10. 0:53it's going to pull the oxygen off the Bismuth  oxide and form CO2 and the Bismuth is going to
11. 1:00be reduced to metal and we'll be able to alloy  with our precious metals and so what's going
12. 1:04to happen is you're going to get a little  piece of bisou metal floating along liquid
13. 1:09it's going to attach itself to the Platinum or  padium or rodium once it's attached it forms an
14. 1:14alloy with that so you have a bismi platinum  alloy it will reduce the melting point and
15. 1:19then it will be able to all be liquid and  collect down at the bottom of our Crucible
16. 1:32we're hoping for nice little bismo button
17. 1:34here and there it is oh just a beautiful  button look at how nice and shiny that is
18. 1:46very nice 21 G just about what you'd expect if  we reduced every single bismo atom out of that
19. 1:53oxide we would end up with about 22 G so we  are right there it worked really really well
20. 2:00let's hope our platinum platium and rodium is in  this little button so now what we're going to do
21. 2:04with our button is we're going to put it in this  cupel we're going to put it in a furnace and heat
22. 2:09it up to about 1,900 or 2000° fah the Bismuth in  here is going to melt is going to react with the
23. 2:17oxygen in the furnace in the environment and it's  going to oxidize the surface of the puddle now the
24. 2:22cupel can't absorb metal but it absorbs metal  oxides really well and the Bismuth is going to
25. 2:27continue to oxidize until melting point of the  alloy gets past the temperature of the furnace
26. 2:33and at that point the button is going to freeze  so in 50 g we got 033 G that doesn't seem very
27. 2:42good does it well I'm pretty disappointed in that  last result but I went home I did some reading and
28. 2:46I found an article that's done some experimenting  with using pyite as a collector for the precious
29. 2:53metals and catalytic converters so we're going  to do a similar thing we're going to take 50 g
30. 2:58of the catalytic converters we'll add 50 g of  pyite and this isn't 100% pyite so we're going
31. 3:06to have a little bit of loss so our mat layer  won't add up to exactly 50 g I actually added
32. 3:12100 G of borax just cuz it didn't look like  I had much flux in there with only 50 g so
33. 3:17I'm going to put it in a nice clean Crucible back  into the furnace we'll smelt it now in this paper
34. 3:23it says that 99% of the platinum and padium  can be recovered and 97% of the rodium can be
35. 3:29covered with this method I got my charge  in the furnace but let's talk a little bit
36. 3:33about what's going on here iron and nickel are  a great collector of Platinum Group metals and
37. 3:39typically you have to get them super hot to  melt the platinum and get it all to collect
38. 3:44on the bottom there's something going on with  the iron sulfide but you get the collection
39. 3:49ability of the iron but the iron sulfide is a  much lower melting temperature and we can do it
40. 3:55in the temperatures of our propane furnace I can't  give you all the details because I couldn't read
41. 3:59the full article so if somebody has it please send  it to me I'll leave a link down the description
42. 4:04below where I got the articles I want to assay the  raw material then I want to assay the slag after
43. 4:10I'm done smelting it and I want to make sure I'm  not losing any cuz if my slag assays hardly any
44. 4:16precious metals then I'll know everything's  collected down in that mat layer PGM assays
45. 4:21are super expensive they're about $250 a piece  so if you guys want to support me I've got a
46. 4:27patreon page or you can give me a super thanks  through YouTube cuz this is going to be really
47. 4:31expensive and I'm giving all this information out  there for free I'd really appreciate it the first
48. 4:36melt I did was just iron pyite it didn't have any  collector metal in it at all so the next melt I
49. 4:41want to take the same amount of material the same  flux and I want to add about 10 G of copper to it
50. 4:48and that way we can have a collector metal in  there and with that copper collector it's all
51. 4:53going to end up in the mat as a copper sulfide  but once I get that mat I can reduce the copper
52. 5:00makes up a flux that will absorb the iron  rich sulfide mat and hopefully will be left
53. 5:07with a copper button with all of our precious  metals that we can then reduce in our celling
54. 5:11furnace and recover a bead of precious metals  and here's our poure with the 10 G of copper
55. 5:17[Music] collector oh man look at that  that is just beautiful beautiful mat
56. 5:29oh it's still pretty hot though man that's  pretty and here's our slag super glassy no
57. 5:37beads or anything in there it's like the perfect  smell hopefully this works this works then it's
58. 5:46it's pretty darn easy to do so the previous mat  was 28 here's the copper collector so we should
59. 5:52have about 38 40 so 40 G that that pencil is  pretty darn good and hopefully there's a half
60. 5:58a gram of platinum plaum and rodium in there  well I'm pretty excited cuz we got two really
61. 6:03good results one with the Iron pyite by itself  and the other one where I added a little bit of
62. 6:07copper to it both really good separation but  now I added that copper cuz I want to try and
63. 6:13get the Platinum out of the mat or at least  the copper and the Platinum together so I'm
64. 6:17going to add 50 g of anhydrous borax I'm going to  add 50 g of soda ash I'm going to add 25 grams of
65. 6:24silica sand then I'm going to add Nails into it  to reduce it all down to FES and that way the
66. 6:30FES is soluble in the slag with the soda ash and  our copper and our precious metals should collect
67. 6:36down at the bottom as a molten metal bead that  we can then refine the precious metals out of
68. 6:42later we'll see what happens I didn't see any  metal pour out of there so I'm a little concerned
69. 6:49about that ideally what would have happened  is the iron Nails will reduce the copper to
70. 6:54metal [Music] so we should not have any mat oh  there's a ton of mat well that didn't work very
71. 7:06well but we got our got our mat back well we  keep getting our really nice glassy slags so
72. 7:12we're doing something right there but our mat  did not cooperate on that smell let's see how
73. 7:19much it weighs I think we started with 40 G 30  31 so we reduced it a little bit but not enough
74. 7:28well it's quite hard I've broken it up into a  couple different pieces there to increase the
75. 7:32surface area I'm going to leave it overnight or  a couple days and see if uh it reacts the water
76. 7:37in the air and just kind of falls apart and  makes that powder we've seen in the past well
77. 7:41I can tell you we're finding a lot of ways that  don't work here's what happened to our mat after
78. 7:46it sat for a couple days I was hoping it would  fall apart but it's still pretty darn hard but
79. 7:51this is what I wanted to happen this is our iron  mat without any copper and once it gets exposed
80. 7:57to the water and the air it just falls apart  into the that powder that you can then recycle
81. 8:01and and reuse again that's what I wanted to have  happen so there's a couple things that could have
82. 8:05happened here one is I put that whole piece of  copper iron mat right into the top of the smelt
83. 8:13and ideally you'd want that all powdered up so  you have a lot of surface area the other thing
84. 8:17that could have happened is I maybe didn't add  enough soda ash to dissolve all that stuff or
85. 8:22maybe I didn't give it enough time in the furnace  with the iron nails but whatever it is it's just
86. 8:26too difficult there's too many things that can  go wrong so what I want to do now is I want to
87. 8:31do the same experiment but instead of using copper  I'm going to use 10 or maybe 20 G of silver here's
88. 8:37our silver we're going to use I'm going to add  I'm going to add 20 G that way we'll have enough
89. 8:42silver that even if we lose a little bit to the  mat we're going to have a button at the bottom
90. 8:47hopefully cross your fingers another nice clean  Crucible and hopefully third times the charm here
91. 9:00all right another Moment of Truth  cross your fingers we got a silver bead
92. 9:03here H beautiful mat again I'm hoping there's  a little bit of silver right here at the bottom
93. 9:15this matte cone well no silver but uh I guess  on the bright side it shows you the iron mat
94. 9:26can dissolve precious metals let's see what this  stuff weighs so about 50 g 51 G first time we got
95. 9:3528 with the copper we got 40 or 41 now we got  51 so it's all in there well I'm going to try
96. 9:41something weird I am trying to break this up to  make it real fine and I can't do it it's really
97. 9:47really hard so I'm going to remelt it and pour  it in water and get it real fine so we I can
98. 9:54mix it up again with some flux use our iron  nail trick and see if I can recover my silver
99. 10:08well looks like that worked all right let's do  this one more time we've got 100 G of anhydrous
100. 10:14borax 100 G of soda ash and 50 g of silica sand  I'm going to add our shot up iron silver mat I'm
101. 10:28actually kind of encouraged that all the Silver's  gone cuz that probably means that it's collecting
102. 10:31the platinum as well now I'm going to smelt this  back down with iron Nails see if I can reduce the
103. 10:38silver back to Silver metal turn the iron mat into  FES which should be absorbed by our soda ash Rich
104. 10:45slag before we look at our slag I wanted to show  you the nails I put in there I initially put in
105. 10:54these six and hopefully the mat got all used up  and then the nails stopped getting eaten up this
106. 11:00one I added three more Nails about 20 minutes  before I poured and they're not eaten at all I
107. 11:05mean they look like normal nails okay I have  a good feeling about this when I poured it I
108. 11:10thought I saw a little glob of metal come out and  not much mat here we go I think I see some metal
109. 11:17there hey it worked hot whoa stuff shooting off  there all over the place so that looks really
110. 11:27really good the silver button is nice and clean  the slag goes all the way down to the silver
111. 11:33there's no matte layer at all the slag is nice and  glassy I don't see any mat in the slag that this
112. 11:39is exactly what you want this is this is this is  great I really really really excited about this
113. 11:45I put 20 G of silver in and we got 20 G back  out so that is awesome we recovered all of our
114. 11:51silver and hopefully our plattinum group metals  are alloyed with this silver I know silver is a
115. 11:57real good collector of that stuff and if if this  works this is going to be just just great I've
116. 12:01been thinking about this problem for years and we  may have just solved it well finally that worked
117. 12:06really well we got our silver button collector  we got rid of all the iron mat hopefully we have
118. 12:13all of our pgms collected in that silver button  and nothing in the slag so now what's going to
119. 12:18happen is I've got some samples here I'm going  to send off for assay we're going to assay them
120. 12:22for platinum plaum and rodium stay tuned for  part two cuz if this all works out I'm going
121. 12:27to scale up and we're going to process a bunch of  catalytic converters so if you're interested in
122. 12:31seeing that be sure to subscribe otherwise thanks  for watching and we'll see you on the next video