Dissolving GOLD with Chlorine Gas

[00:00:08]I've got 10k scrap gold here.

[00:00:14]14k scrap gold and 24k scrap gold. Take our milk dish and put it on the scale. Zero this thing out. This is our 14K stuff. Pour it right on in.

[00:00:37]And it looks like we've got 100.1 g of 14K.

[00:00:45]Here's the 10K stuff.

[00:00:48]She roll the scale. Pour this right on in.

[00:00:56]And it looks like we've got 11.9 g of 10K. Zero the scale out.

[00:01:05]This is our 24K stuff. This came out of my stockp in my waste container.

[00:01:12]I'm going to add this in now.

[00:01:18]And we've got 15.9 g of 24K.

[00:01:25]I've determined I need 181.8 g of sterling silver to this gold. And I've got 188. That's fine. That's a little over. Now, we're going to go out and alloy this sterling silver with this karat gold.

[00:01:45]All right.

[00:04:01]Heat.

[00:04:18]Heat.

[00:04:24]Heat. Heat.

[00:05:07]This is the imported gold. And I want it noted for the record that I forgot to stir the alloy.

[00:05:16]So, this is kind of an experiment to see how this comes out. I usually stir that while it's in the crucible with a graphite rod, and I forgot to do it this time. I'm going to pour in some used nitric acid from a previous refining.

[00:05:33]And we're going to start taking all these base metals out of here now with this nitric acid. Set this up on the heat.

[00:05:46]What I'm doing here is pulling out the silver and base metals that I added.

[00:05:51]Plus any silver and base metals that was already in the alloy will get pulled out with these hot dilute nitric acid boils.

[00:06:05]I think we've got all the uh base metals and silver pulled out of this. And I don't think we've suffered too many ill effects from not stirring the uh alloy when we were in quarting.

[00:06:24]I think we're going to be okay. There's a little bit of gold down in here or some gold kind of like suspended as during the first few nitrate boils, but that's going to be okay.

[00:06:40]All right, here's our pure gold.

[00:06:48]Let me get this silver jar out of the way.

[00:06:54]Now, what we'll do is uh go ahead and try to dissolve this gold.

[00:07:02]Going to add some hydrochloric acid to the gold in this beaker.

[00:07:10]This should be about uh 2 and 12 oz or so. So, we'll go with uh 300 milliliters of hydroic acid. That's actually about 350 milliliters.

[00:07:28]It's still hot and there's still probably a little bit of residual nitric acid left in there. So it starts reacting right away. Going to add some sulfuric acid.

[00:07:43]And what this will do is take care of any lead that we put into solution. When we dissolve this gold, it will combine with any lead in solution, forming insoluble lead sulfate that we can filter out easily.

[00:07:59]Now what I'll do is set this up on the heat. Start heating that mixture. Let's get the water out of the way here. And now what we'll do is start adding doses of nitric acid to form aquaria in there and get all that gold to dissolve.

[00:08:35]I think we've got everything to go into solution.

[00:08:38]Still got just a little bit of fumage going on. And you'll notice that the solution looks kind of strange compared to what it usually looks like. And I think that's because of the incortation air that we did to on this batch. We're going to set this down here and let it cool off.

[00:10:44]Think we've got everything pulled through the filter now.

[00:11:02]Set this off over here way.

[00:11:09]I have two or more to three oz of gold in solution.

[00:11:15]I always add a few ice cubes.

[00:11:35]Precipitate the pure gold with some sodium metabulfite.

[00:11:49]Here we go.

[00:12:01]Heat. Heat.

[00:12:33]That was about six tablespoons of sodium metabulfite.

[00:12:41]Let's give this a stir.

[00:13:06]Let's get in here and do a status test.

[00:13:08]Make sure we've got all of the gold precipitated out of our solution.

[00:13:16]Boom.

[00:13:18]No reaction means we've got all the gold to come down out of that solution.

[00:13:26]Now, what I'll do is pour this waste solution off into a uh waste container that I keep for this purpose.

[00:13:40]I'm just going to dump this off into the waste container. And then I'm gonna rinse it with some hot water to get all the chemicals Now that I have all the chemicals rinsed off, What I'll do is add a little bit of uh hydrochloric acid.

[00:14:24]Give the gold powder a boil in some hydrochloric acid. And what this does is the hydrochloric acid is a little better at removing dissolved metals than just plain hot water. So, we're going to cover this up. Now, we're going to set it up on our heat source. Boil the gold and some hydrochloric acid.

[00:15:01]hydrochloric acid boil is complete.

[00:15:04]So, what we'll do now is uh pour this off and then rinse the acid off with some boiling distilled water.

[00:15:20]In this sequence, I rinsed all the acid off of the gold and then I brought up some chlorine tablets and crushed them up in my mortar and pestle and added them to a 2 L gas generator bottle.

[00:15:40]Here's our gold.

[00:15:43]And I've got two chlorine tablets crushed up in this bottle. So, we're going to get set up now for our next experiment.

[00:16:22]I think we're set up and ready to start the experiment.

[00:16:26]I've got a full 250 ml of hydrochloric acid in that addition funnel that's vented so it doesn't pressurize. So it does equalize pressure in there. two chlorine tablets crushed up in the gas generator bottle. I've got a hose coming out of the gas generator and go into a delivery tube. And so what we're going to do to begin the experiment is take our gold and I'm going to add some hydrochloric acid to our gold here.

[00:17:01]Add chloric acid.

[00:17:16]All right, that's we filled it up to the 350 milliliter level. Dropping in a stir bar. We're going to turn the stir on.

[00:17:28]See if we can get some stirring action going. There we go.

[00:17:35]Now, what I'll do is uh start dripping some hydrochloric acid down into our crushed up chlorine tablets down here. And this should form chlorine gas.

[00:17:54]And we're going to bubble the chlorine gas into the gold and hydrochloric acid solution and try to dissolve the the gold with chlorine gas.

[00:18:11]Now that I've got chlorine gas being generated, I'm going to take my tube here and we're going to stick it down in our gold and bubble the chlorine gas into the gold and hydrochloric acid mixture.

[00:18:27]Try to dissolve the gold with chlorine gas.

[00:18:55]I've used up all the chlorine tablets in the reaction. So, I'm not generating any more gas. So, I think what we're going to do is uh go ahead and call it here. I still got just a tiny bit of gold right there that didn't dissolve, but most of it went into solution. So, I'm going to turn this off and I'm going to take the gas generator apart now.

[00:20:50]in this sequence. I use a magnet to remove the stir bar and then I filter the solution adding ice to it to keep it cool as it filters.

[00:21:16]Filter is absolutely clean.

[00:21:19]Nothing in it.

[00:21:21]which is a sign that we've got some high purity chloral oric acid solution in this container.

[00:21:31]We're going to get set up to do a uh precipitation.

[00:22:05]For this precipitation, what we'll be using is some reagent grade sodium ium by sulfite.

[00:22:21]Here we go. We're going to do a precipitation on our gold now.

[00:22:26]Let's go. Here we go.

[00:22:36]Wow. Look at that.

[00:22:53]While I'm gawking at this, let's get in here and uh get us a status test on this.

[00:23:02]Make sure we got golden solution.

[00:23:07]There you go. That black stain means golden solution.

[00:23:20]Now, let's go ahead and do another spoon of sodium bulfite.

[00:23:25]Here we go.

[00:24:02]Let's give this a stir.

[00:24:25]Let's get in here with a piece of filter paper.

[00:24:30]A status test on this. Make sure we've got all the gold dropped out of solution.

[00:24:37]There you can see negative status test. All the gold has come down.

[00:24:45]I knew something was a miss when I tried to record it settling. Pure gold will settle out quickly and leave a clear and colorless solution behind after it settles. This is not going to settle out. I don't know what's in here, but it's not settling out very well for me.

[00:25:05]So, what we're going to do in order to expedite the process here is we're going to go ahead and uh pour this waste solution off.

[00:25:31]Now, I'm going to take this uh little bit of gold that we've got in here and rinse it down into the waste container.

[00:25:41]Add it to my savings account.

[00:25:55]Going to rinse all the chemical off of here.

[00:26:12]Some hot water.

[00:26:25]Add some hydrochloric acid.

[00:26:28]Boil it. And a little bit of hydrochloric acid.

[00:26:37]I thought this hydrochloric acid boil would clean the gold up for me like it usually does, but when I came out to check on it, it had this foamy precipitate looking stuff that formed on the surface of the hydrochloric acid.

[00:26:56]I don't know.

[00:26:58]It's awful strange looking.

[00:27:04]Don't quite know what to make of this.

[00:27:07]Just going to turn the heat down low.

[00:27:10]Turn it off. Let this settle out.

[00:27:16]Here we go. The stuff uh the gold doesn't look too bad down in there on the bottom underneath the solution.

[00:27:24]It's got a clear solution, colorless. I don't know what that stuff is floating on top. I'm not going to spend any more time with this.

[00:27:36]So, what we'll do is just pour this off into my waste container like we usually do.

[00:27:45]And then I'll rinse it with hot water to get any junk off there. All the acid rinsed off.

[00:28:09]Now we're going to rinse it with some hot water.

[00:28:13]As I started the hot distilled water rinses, some more of that funky powder began to form every time I poured water in there. It reminds me of cocoa powder that doesn't dissolve well in water.

[00:28:35]Looks like quite a bit of gold added to my uh savings account from this refining.

[00:28:42]That's quite all right. We'll get all that out of there at a later date. None of it gets lost.

[00:29:16]Heat. Heat.

[00:33:25]pure gold that we just got done refining.

[00:33:29]And uh I don't know what that stuff was that was creating problems for me.

[00:33:34]Probably because I didn't stir the alloy when I first started the video.

[00:33:40]And uh I just forgot to do it. There's a little bit of blistering on top, but the appearance of the bar does not look too bad. And let's see. I think we were expecting over here 79 g of pure gold from this lot. Let's see what we actually got here.

[00:34:02]70.3.

[00:34:04]So, we lost a few grams. I'm certain some of it ended up in my uh waste container. You can tell a lot about the appearance of the gold by how it looks after it's melted. And this don't look too bad. And the whole idea behind this video was to demonstrate that we could dissolve gold using chlorine gas. And I think we accomplished that. So this will conclude the video. And I'd like to thank everyone for watching.