Can Platinum & Palladium Be Smelted From Catalytic Converters? Urban Mining Platinum and PGMs!
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- Опубліковано 6 вер 2024
- Direct smelting of catalytic converters for the recovery of platinum and palladium. This experiments show the process Jason used to try and recovery the Pt, Pd, and other PGM from catalytic converters. Using flux, crucibles, and a propane fired furnace the ceramic honeycomb is dissolved and the platinum and palladium are collected with a lead and copper collector metal. Check out how much precious metal is collected at the end!
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The convection currents at around 4:40 are mesmerizing, sun-like, lava-like.
Looks just like the photos from the parker solor probe
عندي كميه والله اريد أرقام المشتريين انامن اليمن
@@user-xb2xo5mr9f What quantity of what are you selling on YT comments?
Looks like another devil dimension
I have nothing productive to add, except that I enjoy watching people do things I have never done before, nor probably will ever get the chance of doing. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for watching and commenting!
@@mbmmllc 21 years from now, college geology professors may be teaching about things you found, but for now, they'll say what the textbooks said 41 years ago.
with hot work like this, the very small particles of metal do not have the weight to move against the convection currents in a crucible so stay quite evenly distributed throughout your slag. you need a rotating furnace that brings all the slag into contact with the collector metal at the bottom of the crucible. the molten metal collector stays on the bottom of the crucible and the rotating agitation of the crucible brings all the flux into contact with it allowing it to do its job of alloying with your target element.
Q
I LOVE the zoom ins on the pours cooling on the surface 😍
Hipnotic..
When firing glazes: Copper when in oxidised atmosphere creates green glaze, when in reduction atmosphere it makes red.
Hi Jason
It is difficult to recover catalysts by gas smelting. Refineries do it in electric arc furnaces where high temperatures are reached.
On the other hand, when metals such as palladium are copelled, the final button usually does not reach more than 50% purity due to the high temperature of the palladium.
So the lead is not oxidated 100%
There are two types of catalysts. Some contain only palladium and others contain palladium, platinum, and rhodium.
On the other hand, it is always convenient to grind and mix well. For this type of analysis, litargirium (PbO), is usually used as a collector and some charcoal to reduce the lead.
good video!!!
When I was driving over the road in the 90's. I hauled dessicates in which it is the same thing as what catalytic converter is made of. The plant that i took them to used acids to dissolved everything. Then processed it in stages to remove all of the metals out. By the time everything is done all is left is clay. Even that was sold to the farmers as well. I hope that hint was very helpful.
What are dessicates??
@@omarez6896 It is round clay balls used in dehydration systems of Gas Plant Operations and In Refineries in the area of the plant they call the Cracker. It is also the same thing that you would find in your common double/ Triple pane glass windows. If you look closely around the edges between the glass. You will see tiny louvers cut in the tube. Inside that tubing is the dessicates (about the size of bird shot or rat shot). They control moisture in between the glass keep them from fogging up with temperature differential.
I hope this helps answer your question.
to my understanding there's about 10x more palladium than platinum in catalytic converters....and palladium is more expensive than platinum anyhow.....
Gold is more expensive than platinum now too.
@@zer0deaths862 Barely at this rate. Gold isn't under a shortage. Palladium and copper are.
Those convection cells look awesome, every time you pour from the smelt it looks like the surface of the sun.
When you cupola the copper, lead and platinum , what happens to the copper and lead? Does it absorb into the cupola or turn into a gas? Would that vapor be poisonous?
Platinum, Palladium, and Rhodium are the precious metals used in catalysts. The use of Platinum vs. Palladium seems to follow which one is cheaper, as they both do pretty much the same thing. Many modern catalyst don't have any platinum in them...
Also- if you are getting a catalyst off of a car made in the last 20 years, there are generally two of them- the front one will be loaded with 3-5x more palladium, and maybe 1.5x the amount of Rhodium. In terms of ratios of the precious metals- on the front brick, it will be in the 40:1 range of palladium:rhodium, and on the second brick, closer to 5:1.
Interestingly enough, the very first PZEV cars, in the 2000-2005 time frame will have the most metal in them. Lots have been learned since then- and the metal usage is much better optimized vs the cost. Find the cats off a PZEV BMW, Ford, Honda, etc of that era, and you have the best potential for higher recovery.
alfamaize ....I like how you made your point but most of it is incorrect....certainly your 2nd paragraph.....there is no finite ratio to go with.....I see where you are going with it but to say it’s a general rule is wrong
@@jarradmoore6939 No, it's correct- I've been working specifically in automotive emissions for a couple of decades now, and the ratios of the metals in catalysts are very specifically laid out. As are the actual amounts of metals on the bricks. The odd measurement that is used is g/cu ft. Why that, I have no idea. But that's what we've been using, and still use.
I worked on the early PZEV cars, and know that they used about double what we do now to achieve the same result.
Automotive catalysts are very specifically engineered devices, and the ratios I posted are rough generalities which are reasonably close.
alfamaize ...no you are incorrect....you didn’t even specify fuel source of the vehicles ....horsepower of the engines Or the simple fact that a large number of vehicles only actually have one....
Good morning Jason,
I watch every video you do. I really appreciate your approach. Thanks fort showing both the successes and failures. I did a lot of salvage work over the years, and if the cat is one of the aftermarket cats there is a good possibility that there was very little PM in it to start with. When I sold cats to the yard they would pay $100 to $150 for oem cats but only $7 for aftermarket cats. Reason they gave was almost no Pl and Pd in aftermarket units. Same price for brand new cats if aftermarket.
Thank you for the information! Also thank you for watching our videos so diligently, it means a lot to us (especially Jason) when people return so often.
By OEM you mean new? And aftermarket is used?
@@freeman2399 OEM is original equipment manufacture (GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, etc.) and aftermarket would be others
@@mbmmllc Low grade Cat
I've never melted or smelted any metals in my life but I find it interesting to watch these videos from time to time.
I'm always curious about something... Can it really be profitable to smelt scrap like this in a small scale?
I haven't done any calculation or anything but it looks like it's using a lot of propane in comparison of the size of the beads that I see at the end to these videos and there also the cost of the crucible and other stuff like that...
Palladium is in the Platinum metal group family and worth around 2.5 times that of Platinum.
This is an excellent video and I throughly enjoyed it.
Thank you so much for watching!
I work for a exhaust company that makes a lot of converters besides exhaust systems. The ceramic is coated in the palladium as well as platinum. The company saves all the dust from production as well as broken bricks and sends them out to a contractor to extract the precious metals. They send them out in a cardboard barrel like a 50 gallon drum. They posted once on how much they got back a barrel and it was between 10000 to 12000 American dollars.
That's crazy! Do you know their process for extraction?
@@mbmmllc I believe it's a acid extraction. They do so much at a time and I believe it goes to somewhere in Pennsylvania to get processed. The cardboard barrels we usually send 10 or more at a time, and its usually once or twice a year. The big automotive companies, one buys the converters the other one pays for them after there assemble and delivered. So they usually can't send the junk broken pieces until they sign off of them. Everything has to be strictly recorded because of possible theft. The one company usually does brick inventory at least twice a year because they buy them first.
@@mbmmllc some of the big duramax converters are as big or bigger than a 5 gallon bucket.
I have a theory. The ceramic is zirconium dioxide, which melts at 2715ºC, almost 700ºC higher than platinum. If it doesn't melt, then the platinum or palladium coating may not dissolve in the metal. Acid extraction with HCl and either hypochlorite or nitric acid seems like the more viable alternative.
Zirconium is some pretty nasty stuff. Mention above was made of clay residues of processed desiccates. In the past, 60 Minutes or a similar show told of how some companies were disposing of hazardous expensive-to-dispose of zirconium and other wastes, in plant fertilizers, in the clayey matrix/filler material of the pellets, basically unloading it in fertilizers and not telling the farmer customers. And disposing of it via loophole, on farmland and in the food animals and people eat.
Bro platinum melts at 3,215*F and zirconium melts at 3,371*F so not that different but acid is more efficient
you need to preheat the mould you poured the molten charge into, the chill margin contains micro particles of copper and platinum, hense the red color.
In smelting you have a few challenges. The catalytic substrate is a carbide ceramic that gets treated with a silica dioxide and aluminum oxide "wash coat" to increase surface area with an addition of ceria zirconia to promote O2 storage. the core is engineered with rhodium as the reduction catalyst and palladium as the oxidizer or just platinum as it does both but that creates side reactions.
My "guess" is that the substrate is your biggest hurdle as it is engineered to to withstand 1000 Celsius. The zirconium could be an issue too. You had high palladium values so I would expect to see more rhodium though that would get eaten by the catalytic reduction by use.
@R Kelly lemonade wholesales your life must suck if all you do in life is troll youtube comments
Troll? Hardly!
Agree with most of what the OP mentions. Only 2 comments I'd make: honeycomb substrate for flow-through catalyst is almost always cordierite. Silicon carbide substrates are used for diesel particulate filters - mostly in Europe.
Rhodium is very expensive, but is the very best catalyst for NOx reduction. A catalyst, by definition, doesn't get used up in the conversion of the pollutants into CO2, nitrogen and water.
I'm surprised to learn of road dusts containing quantities of precious metals from autocatalysts.
What if electrolysis was used to extract the precious metals?
and by the way- once you get Ruthenium out, you can probably use it to electroplate thin sheets of base metal with then layers of Ruthenium, and make a sunlight hydrogen generator. Sunlight strikes the Ruthenium and apparently adds to its natural vibrational energy, causing it TO SPLIT WATER.
thin layers
most of the time that I've seen catalytic converter extractions, acids were used. They also used a LOT of catalytic converters because the amount of platinum is miniscule per CAT Converter.
Not sure why I was suggested these videos... Google knows a lot about me apparently. This was super interesting. Please keep it up
For that amount of platinum in the smelting mixture it essentially dissolves. If the concentration was higher then you could smelt it out because it would surpass its maximum solubility in the molten slag. For this low concentration material, chemical leaching is really your best bet. Aqua regia soak on the pulverized ceramic matrix followed by precipitation of each metal in the oxidation series.
Apparently there is between 3-7 grams of platinum group metals in a catalytic converter, that is quite a bit.
Exascale seems right - as I was watching the video I was wondering why he was smelting it before purifying it. It doesn't matter if there's 3-7 grams per convertor, that's a LOT of slag/flux per batch and seems really wasteful compared to an acid process.
@@rdizzy1 3-7 grams for a new one, the Pt metals will erode in use.
Codyslab did a video in which he collected dust of an highway and managed to extract some platinum from it.
Would be very interesting to see the XRF analysis for the crushed catalytic core material. I'm guessing that there should be Pt Pd and maybe Rh in there possibly depending on whether it was a cat from a gasoline engine or a diesel engine.
If you have XRF then the data for the starting material and the product and possibly the slag MAY indicate where each precious metal can be found.
Remember that finely divided precious metals are harmful to health.
Finely divided? Do you mean crushed or ground up?
The way the slag turned out was awsome,definitely made my brain start smoking to the thought of the reasons why. Your videos are wonderful very informative style of resorce...love that you post your experiments that have errors as well as the successful ones .there's so much learned from both .Great job Jason keep the videos comming they are greatly appreciated.....
My guess is that there's some sort of redox reaction between the copper collector metal and the steel mould that caused the colour change.
It would have been neat to cut and polish it
I didn’t even think of that but I believe you are correct
Rhodium is the primary catalyst among the mix catalyst, and much higher temperature is required to smelt it.
Looks like it formed iron oxide hydroxide when it came into contact with the rusty cone mold
there are three heavy metals in a cat #1. platinum, #2.rhodidium, #3.paladium . the cat you were doing your demo on was pretty much burnt out due to excessive unburnt hydrocarbin why theifs perfer to cut them off of new veheicles. and yes it is a chem process to remove the precious metals from the cat as someone mentioned before. EXCELANT INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO very educational on how a cat cooks off when a the check engine light comes on for multiple misfirer. love this video as well as all your other ones again keep up the good work.
Interesting experiment. Sreetips also thinks platinum is very tricky. I had my fingers crossed for you. Thanks for sharing, I am loving your experiments!
Sreetips is good but if you look a thoise elements channel some platinum group metals will only go into solution in a strong chlorine solution and that why it follows the silver and gold. Just acid won’t separate all the platinum groups out of silver and gold.
Thank you so much! We're so glad you liked the video and all the experimenting we've been doing lately!
@@mbmmllc I found the name of the melting point of alloys below parent metals. "eutectic"
There are 3 metals in the cat, you need to use a chemical bath to extract the metals.
The one your looking for is rhodium.
nope 20 time more palladium in a cat than rhodium
To me, what you had, is a pre cat which is different than a normal converter. I believe it's because of its close proximity to the initial point of combustion with less catalist used. I was a auto mechanic for 25 years, the ones I believe have more precious metals are your larger luxury vehicles, suv's, German or japanese imports. I could go on, Mercedes was the one I recycled for the most amount of money..and it was also one of the biggest. Hope this helps
He had one of the lowest grade converters that they make in this video. Its a subaru RCAE2 code. Very very low value.
12:07 This is what a refiner's Christmas tree looks like
Great video! Amazing how much UA-cam college one can consume during a lockdown
Crazy to think you left this comment 10 months ago and we are still in this lockdown pandemic state
@@timothy3610 yup, that’s what I’ve been afraid of since day 1. That once it began, people in power don’t want it to end.
“Although the quantities vary by model, on average, only one standard catalytic converter contains about 3-7 grams of platinum, 2-7 grams of palladium, 1-2 grams rhodium. “ Could this be the reason for the differences? I also thought some had gold in them.
That looks to be a Subaru OEM cat. That particular one would be classified as a low-grade half cat. That with the fact that it is not new you might only be looking at .5g to 2g max recoverable PGMs. Hope this helps.
Thank you for the information!
The ropey orange lines drifting on the surface of the cooling slag are mesmerizing. I need a loop of this as a screensaver. It looks like the surface of the sun.
Great video! Always wanted to try cat smelting (I would have added silver instead of copper as collector to aid the lead and the cupellation). @ 16:36 Pb-Pt eutectic point is 327C (554F) 95wt% Pb + 5wt% Pt meaning that an alloy composed of 95g Pb and 5g Pt would melt at 327C (554F). Once again great video!
Thanks Owl. Yes, I think silver is the way to go! I will be doing another vid soon and use silver as the collector. Thanks for the info on the Pb-Pt eutectic!
@@mbmmllc also to get the actual weight of the bead you need melt with an oxyacetylene torch so all lead is absorbed into the cupel
That was almost psychadelic watching the material in the cone mold after the pour. Yeah, what Adam Steidl said...
What are the rough costs for each use of flux, propane?
Always interesting. Well edited video
total cost per melt is about $5
I've seen the dimple with other people doing that - you're somewhere in the high 80s to low 90% purity.
I was wondering where my catalytic converter went. Glad to see the missing copper went to good use, as well...
@MaybeSo MaybeNot Honda Pilot, busy parking lot in broad daylight couple months ago. Cat conv thefts getting common around here (west Canada)...
Cool stuff, like what you are doing. Even if I have no expertise i metallurgy at all I'm pretty sure what the problem is : you are probably looking for the wrong metal. That's why you found palladium ( that's what you are supposed to find in a cat converter from a petrol driven car) instead of Platinum which is only used in Diesel cars. Anyway, very interesting stuff.
Will the jewelry or scrap precious metal buyers buy the honeycomb from a gas car cat that is just crunched up in a bag ?
Would some type of vibration during cool down make more precious metals separate more easily with the vibration helping gravity and make it all fall down to center tip more efficient/proficient? Just wondering...(possibly even a vibration that creates a frequency that one or more does/ and or does not like and separate even more?
yep
On your previous video I was thinking to myself if you would ever do recovery from a catalytic converter, do you have ESP or something?
Nice experiment I hope you get an answers to a solution for the smelting process to work, Otherwise couldn't you have pulverized the material into a powder and ran it on a small shaker table as the material you are trying to recover is heavier than gold? Then take what ever the table sorts out and smelt that material?
Nurdrage made a video and I think Cody's lab too, they did it with chemicals and lots of glassware and stirrers
I think the Sreetips PGM series are the most comprehensive I'm aware of.
Thanks for watching! We might check those videos out!
Cody has some good videos, but a lot of the chemistry goes over my head.
@@mbmmllc sreetips is the channel you want to check out...
@@mbmmllc I would also suggest taking a look at NurdRages precious metal video.
I think I'd ball-mill the honeycomb to start with, getting in nice and fine. Also, I wouldn't cut the can. I'd use a shear, or I'd ram like a shit lever with knob up into it (or down from the top) or use a clean pry-bar to crack it and get it to come out, maybe using an inspection cam or flashlight to make sure it all came out. I always thought cutting creates metal fragments or abrasive particles which might make the job harder, or be contaminants, but maybe not. I thought: if I didn't add any metal to the process, the only metals present would be the ones I wanted: the PGMs.
Thanks for the videos dude, I learn so much from them! I love the humility and the growth in knowledge, even in the face of a unsuccessful smelt!
there is a monthly guide available that lists the the amount in $ that each catalytic converter carries by make and serial number.
Some Cats have A Lot of metals, and some almost nothing. Most 3rd party replacements have Little PMGs Try one from a dodge 2500, there should be a lot in one of them. get it from a muffler shop not ebay, many of those are already acid washed.
Gasoline cats are mostly Palladium (1oz/10 average) with a little Platinum and Rhodium( 1 oz / 100 +/- cats).
Diesel Particulate Filters are mostly Platinum then a little Palladium (with RH)
The metal makes the burn temp.
The metal is usually Fumed onto a ceramic honeycomb, very equally distributed and deeply penetrating the ceramic. The ball/bead catalytic converter the metals is only on the outer surface of the ceramic beads.
There are also metal based catalytic converters, I think they would be better for Vulcan style recovery vs alchemically.
Do you have access to a centrifuge? no? make a holder with a wire and swing the liquid metal before you pour it, that will help concentrate the heaver metals.
if you liquefy the ceramic you might try ultrasonic vibrations to get the PMGs to separate out of the ceramics. It is Closely Associated. Stiring may help also. Think of it as rendering lard from fat.
It might have something to do with the reactivity series of metals iron replaced the oxide and copper formed on the side?
What is a qpell? I may not be spelling it right but, I have never heard this word before. Is this an industry term? I tried looking it up on the internet but, since I don't really know how to spell it, I couldn't find anything.
A 'cupel'. Look for 'ore smelting'. Watch Dan Hurds channel, he's got some great vids on smelting and cupelling.
Wonderful video! Love the way you cut to the chase and avoid the non-essential stuff. I'm not surprised to see so many contaminants in your analysis. All of them are commonly found with lead, but could have come from fuel exhaust, as well. Keep up the good work! Some smart and experienced people follow your videos judging form their comments . . .it all adds to the enjoyment.
should be no lead in the cat to begin with unless they put it in them to start with, we moved to unleaded gas a while back, it was prob lead that didnt want to melt cause it amalgumed with high temp pgms
Thanks for watching and commenting!
Hi Jason Thanks for sharing your experiences with us And your valuable information I have a question I hope for clarification The materials you add are borax, sodium carbonate, and lead. What is the benefit of each substance in melting platinum in car exhaust?
Dear Jason can u help us how to melt nickel ore?
Would there be a build up of norms/naturally occurring radioactive materials in catalytic converters from the traces in gasolene that is burned over the years through that exhaust system?
It take a device to tell.
I keep thinking what I see is like formation/distribution of metals/rocks in the earth as you heat and cool the materials. The results look like interesting rocks. I guess you add millions of tons of pressure, temperature and lots of time... the stuff I walk on.
Just some thoughts for the sake of discussion:
"The Mystery of Our Declining Genes" video presentation, and the book "Genetic Entropy" indicate a young earth age. Species are accumulating damage to their genetic codes in their reproductive cells and dying out as in only thousands of years, due to cosmic and background radiation. Life can't by chance as has been shown from chemistry and probability. Thus, the fossils in the rocks can't be old, and the rocks with fossils are not old. And, the time period is very limited. I think time is far less a factor. In the soil factors equation, time is listed, but in reality the amount of water passed through the soil, regolith, and bedrock is the time factor, when past time is so limited. With rocks and metal distribution, there's really only several thousand years available for something to have happened. Geology news stories talk about earthquakes being responsible for quick placement of gold.
correction of sentence: Life can't arise by chance.....
Really, it can't. Relatively simple proteins calculated probability of arising by chance are 'operationally impossible' at greater than 1 in 1 times ten with 71 zeroes after it. The odds of the simplest cells arising by chance are less than 1 in 1 times ten with 5,000 zeroes after it. There are enzymes which speed reactions up that would on their own for the chemicals involved take 100 billion plus years. And enzymes are protein.
Relevance? The earth is not very old, as in only thousands of years old. There's value in remembering that in exploration for oil, gas, minerals, precious metals, etc.. Also puts life in proper perspective, and proves Genesis as accurate, and the rest of the Bible. WHOA, said too much.
Palladium cats are mainly used for gasoline engines. Platinum is used more for diesel cats. The good news is that palladium is worth more than double than platinum.
Thank you for this information!
Blows my mind how this stuff is done
I think you should invite Cody and Sreetips up for a visit. It would make for a fun video.
That sounds like a great idea! Who knows, maybe a collab is in the future?
@@mbmmllc Jeff Williams lives in the South West, Two Toes lives in California.
عندي كميه والله اريد أرقام المشتريين انامن اليمن
Hi Jason
I have done similar experiment. The best flux for smelting cats is Cryolite.
Also, once the flux cats mix melted then add lead.
For copper used as collector you should mix tiny copper wires flux and pulverized cats and let it smelt.
I am working on hydrometallurgy and it is promising.
Thank you for this information! We will definitely take this into account if we do this experiment again!
Thanks for the video.
Not all catalytic converters are equal.
The old ones have more Platinum/Palladium in them. The new ones use more advance technology to bind the Platinum/Palladium into the honey comb; thus uses less precious metals.
Of all the comments only Seymour Pro made a reference to the XRF gun. I don't understand why you are working in blind and just assume things when it just takes a minute to test the materials along the way.
1. Test the cat material to see what proportions of PGM:s there is. If you have 20% Pt and 80% Pd when you start then you should have roughly the same proportions when you are finished or you have losses along the way.
2. Test the lead and copper used as collector metals so you don't add anything that way. There are especially high grade lead sold for doing precision work assays via cupellation.
3. Test the collected metal as well as the slag to see what you collected before cupellation.
4. Test the beads after cupellation as well as the cupel. That way you might be able to detect any losses when cupelling with copper.
All in all an interesting video and my guess on the color change of the slag, oxidation state of the surface, some oxygen have penetrated and oxidized the surface layer. But you have an XRF, use it to see if there is any difference between the composition of the red pieces compared to the core green slag. :-)
I wish I could afford an XRF, it's such a versatile tool when working with precious metal scrap.
I was wondering to myself if there was any actual carsinization of the copper in the color variation.
I glad you are honest. I myself have many failures when working with metals.
This is okay if you get the catalytic converters legally, where I live there is a rising problem of thieves cutting the converters from cars, even on peoples driveways. You have massive expense to replace the converter so you can driver your car again
I cut them out of my own cars I buy and scrap them, we don't have emissions in the county where i live! Its the first thing I do pull the exhaust down cut a hole in the top of the cat take the comb out weld it back shut and get a spacer for the rear 02 sensor so it doesn't read rich and mess up the air fuel ratios and set off check engine lights.
@@DanTheMan454 Nice. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Be well wherever you are, my friend.
Check the melting temps for your metals. Is 2,000° hot enough ?? Are iridium and rhodium present in the cats??
Rhodium is $20,000 + right now.
Nice. I wonder if just leaving the pgms in the lead longer would work out.they are more dense than gold. Its cool going through the learning process . figuring out how to make it work. Fun fact , platinum oxides ignite alcohol. There was even a cigarette lighter design was made around that concept from the 1920's. After the main crucible and cupel cool, I wonder if a drop of alcohol would ignite when added, after smelting platinum . do you live in an area the sands roads in The winter? I wonder how well a shaker table would work for getting out the pgms from that road sand. There's supposedly enough to mine on a busy road...it can be up to few ounces per ton if the sand is reused year after year and sees alot of traffic. .I think the cupel ate your platinum. I also think ceramic is the problem and if you can seperate the metal from that, which is where the chemicals usually come into play. smelting would be possible. Maybe the shaker table could help woth that on some level . the converter works on the same principles as the pgm oxides and alcohol ignition. The pgms are bonded into the ceramics. They react with the exaust and heat up intensely , both incinerating solids so they dont clogg the ceramic filter, and so toxins can be captured by exchanging them for pgms in the exaust and vice versa in the ceramics. Those are the particals in the road dirt btw. The green and red slag looks like iron and pgms also. Funny , I have rock samples that look lie the first slag. Same transparent drab green on a black base.
It looks to me like you have platnum group metals in the slag .
Need to soak the converter in hydrochloric acid to get rid of all the base metals , still crushing up the catalytic converter , and on a medium heat for an afternoon , then do straight aqua regia( 3 parts hydrochloric, 1 part nitric) until all the metals are dissolved , and then add 50 grams zinc powder to the dissolved solution to drop out all precious metals. even a thin metal plating should yield two grams from a honeycomb surface like that . And the good news about using zinc is that it easily dissolved in HCL so any black to purple powder at the bottom of the beaker will be all the precious metals above zinc in the dissolution scale of chemical digestion. Gold Platinum , Palladium, and there shouldn't be any silver in there , but if you get a white pasty powder in the bottom of you aqua regia bath then it's silver so always filter the aqua regia before adding the zinc powder.
Somewhere out there , there's a video of cleaning the streets with a street sweeper. They took the road material and smelled out the platinum. You might check on that. They did get platinum as I remember. Great job and video. There's a new job for recycling. Street material recovery!!!
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Here's a thought, some research for you. I remember reading some metals can form alloys that have different melting temperatures to the parent metals. Perhaps see if platinum has such an alloy buddy.
Another thought, team up with a chemical refiner say with half the converter each, maybe then you can see if your converter did contain no platinum and only palladium?
Either way it would be cool to compare results
Great video ! Keep up the good work.I'm just wondering if it is dangerous to the lungs or the skin to inhale the cat dust or any other stuff that is part of the process.
quite dangerous
Or the damn lead gas rolling out of his electric furnace lol
This seems like a really inefficient way to get the platinum and palladium out of catalytic converter matrix. There are chemical stripping agents that take a bit longer to do the job but seem to be much more effective and more simple to recover the final product from.
streetips has good videos on cat refining
You have to chemically remove the platinum from cats as its platinum oxide in them not metal.
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that was a super cool, cooling process after you poured it into the cone
At elevated temperatures platinum will oxidize to platinum pentoxide and sublimate into the air. Aqua regia works better than smelting.
are you related to parker schnabel from gold rush?
That cone mold should have been red hot when you poured the metal to cool
No, it should not. If it were, all the metals you're trying to collect would just end up plating the mold.
Looks , like olivine or jade Crystal awesome ! I'd keeep it
Palladium is used in gasoline engine exhaust, and platinum in Diesel. Considering scarcity of diesel cars, you most likely processed a "gasoline" converter, so your result should not be surprising. Nicely done both, experimentation and vid!
put cat honeycomb thru rock crusher and shaker table first?
Dude, great video. Even a failure answers your audience's questions! Thanks!
James, good day! I watched your video again. I am interested in this question, but we do not have catalysts - waste treatment of the factory with the content of PMG and iron. We will study this issue, I found this article check it out. It is interesting + further electrolysis. (An Integrated Capture of Red Mud and One-Step
Heat-Treatment Process to Recover Platinum Group Metals
and Prepare Glass-Ceramics from Spent Auto-Catalysts
Chuan Liu 1,2, Shuchen Sun 1,2,*, Ganfeng Tu 1,2 and Faxin Xiao 1,2) Minerals MDPI
I wonder if the red Slagle was caused by oxidized copper cementing out on contact with the steel cone mold and forming iron oxide
hi jason.
in electric oven cabin, the uncovered, exposed resistors 6:49min., is not damaged from lead fumes and vapors ?
thnk for video.
Hey Jason. I've seen that color before when trying to smelt zink, lead, silver concentrate out of as mine in Oruro, Bolivia. I failed... left me wondering if I should have roasted or something....
I think you are running into a few problems.
1. The surface area of the CC honeycomb powder vs surface tension of the melted metals. The amount of melted precious metals is so small it would be very difficult to move to the bottom of the crucible. I would think if you got the "solvent" metal in contact with the material it would work better, but I think it would be difficult with this setup.
2: Melting point of Platinum is over 3200F. I didn't hear the temp you said you got to, but if the lead or copper isn't touching the surface of all the catalyst material, how would it dissolve the precious metals?
I was confused by your videos bc I never heard of a cupel before, so I may have missed some things you said while I was trying to figure out what you were doing. I thought you had boiled off the 100+g of lead when you got that bead. So IDK if you have mentioned this but the copper and lead are working as a solvent for the other metals, allowing them to melt at a lower temp. I did this with Zinc allowing aluminum & copper to melt into it at a much lower temp than either of their MP. So if the alloying metal wasn't in contact with the catalyst material it's not going to absorb it. I think this may be the reason why acids are used for recovery of this product. They may also use larger amounts of copper and process many converters with the same metal so when it's finally cupel'd there is a much larger amount recovered.?
KDE5FAN, to answer your question about the lead, Jason heated the mixture with the kiln door slightly open to permit oxygen in so the lead would oxidize. Lead oxide is "soluble" in a bone ash or calcium phosphate cupel and flows into the thick wall of the cupel, in time, leaving the platinum behind as a bead (at least, that was the plan). The cupel is a single use cupel, now filled with lead oxide and has thus become an environmental concern as a waste product. Sinnce lead oxide is quite insoluble in water, it doesn't travel very far over time if it were put into a landfill dump (maybe eleven inches every 100 years).
What kind of XRF gun do you have and what do you use it for? How much does one cost?
Looks like y’all just figured out how to make man made Ruby’s if that outside of the green slag is as red as it looks like.
1:00 Good thing muh welding face mask provides a steady stream of clean air for me to breathe!
What’d do you do with the flux when done
You need to add flurospar flux recipe to help dissolve the ceramic Jason
Thank you for the tip!
I enjoy the way you roll up your sleeves and just play with it. Great experiment! I’m guessing applying heat isn’t the way to go, though
Just an idea.. try mining on the freeway on a bridge sweeping the road next the barrier wall and melt that material and see if it has same metals
Do you know what the platinum content of the converter (plating) was to begin with?
Try using silver with your lead, rather than copper. Cupel off the lead, but don't oxidize the silver. Process the bead chemically.
Thanks for the tip! We'll definitely think about trying that in the future!
Although fascinating to watch(Sreetips, Cody's Lab, Nile Red, etc), the chemical process consumes a lot of costly and harmful acid's and other materials and produces a lot of waste that needs to be dealt with.
@@benwinkel costly, true, but there's a reason it's the method that is used. PGMs are flat out difficult to deal with, so the losses through smelting are greater than the expense of alternate methods. That assumes, of course, that you have material to even make it viable.
Hi Jason I have tried smelting 100g of ceramic to extract platinum But it didn't work And I added everything I mentioned in the video 100 grams of ceramic needs 100 grams of borax, 100 grams of sodium hydroxide and 50 grams of silicon Are these articles correct
Hi there im in western Australia i have some ore i want looked at can i send u a sample
I don't get where the lead ends up going when heating it up in the electric furnace?
Will jewelry or scrap precious metal buyers buy the 'honeycomb' that has not been smelted just crunched up in a bag?
Black stuff is probably carbon from the car it came from possibly?
I’ve been watching off and on for some months. Your pattern seems to me is one attainment of knowledge after another- so, I subscribed just now. Carry on!
The Cadillac converter that you used if I am correct is called a pre cat which stands for pre catalytic converter they are usually up closer to the engine right off the headers and they are less than half the size of a standard cat
It might not be a question of "what you did wrong". Maybe the precious metals came off in the soot when a trucker manually or automatically cleans the stack? I'd like to see you try this with a pound of soot that comes from those cones. (I have some)