Ewaste gold and copper recovery using hydrometallurgy 

8:07 I think you're going to want to burn those filter cartridges to melt down & reclaim the.anode slidge fines that were generating your cloudiness.

For the copper cell to work properly your anode must contain at least 95% copper. Low voltage and amperage are needed for a smooth deposition of copper on the cathode. During the process volt and ampere must be gradually reduced even more to avoid formation of large crystals near the end of the electrorefining run. Irregular crystals tend to form on the edges of the cathode. Cover the edges with a plastic based paint; or better, cover them with reuseable plastic strips of some kind (fx. cut up plastic tubing). Polished thin stainless sheet metal is perfect as cathode, afterwards it just needs to be bent a little and the copper can easily be peeled off. I use old solar panels for my cells (I have 55 old panels which came in to be scrapped, but still works; albeit at somewhat reduced efficiency). It takes a long time but at no energy cost. I'm a full time scrapper and uses both electrowinning and electrorefining for various metal recovery. My largest yield was 1960 kg of pure lead from CRT glass tubes; and yes, I have saved all the powder from the inside of the front panel glass for later recovery of REEs (Rare Earth Elements). All internal parts of the glass funnels are processed for nickel recovery. I never waste time pulling pins from electric wire connectors. Plugs and connectors are always pyrolyzed together to remove all plastic, yielding metals and Raw Pyrolysis Oil. After hydrometallurgical solder removal (for tin/lead/silver recovery), they are melted and cast into a flat anode for copper removal/recovery by electrowinning. The slimes are collected and later processed for PM recovery, with a minimum of acid consumption. By the way, all my acids are homemade at no cost (HCl, HNO3, and H2SO4).

Nice job..

Awesome, Love your stuff!

good work, screw the negative, if we learn one thing we have done well 😀

I respect your efforts. All this is very interesting but it really does boil down to economic feasibility. I suspect that a lot of the copper that's precipitating out into the cathode is from the copper sulfate solution itself plus the copper in the anode. In the end, all this work needs to translate into profit or it just isn't worth it. Perhaps pulverisng the circuit boards in a tumbler with steel balls and leaching out the gold using a cyanide process might be more economically feasible.

My friend did something like this and he was wanting to get the precious metals out of it but his turned out to become a dense heavy black rock and it was all alloyed together. Then I said to him you never know what properties that rock could have because who mixes them all together? It's no different than a meteorite

Could you share drawing this system, so I have waste solder (pb-free) I would like to separate Ag, Sn, Cu

What about the silver, platinum, rhodium, palladium etc?? How can you recover that?

I'm curious as to why you say it leeches too much copper out of the system?

Hello🤝. I wonder why didn't you melt everything to the end, so that people can clearly see that it is gold, and not some strange crystals??You brought out some crystals and black dregs saying that this is gold. Agree, is it not true to do so?

Overall, I like the process, and I think you could benefit from following @sreetips lead by "cornflaking" your anode material & putting it inside the anode bag as small pieces, with a poures weight/electrode sitting on top of them. This allows most of the flaked-off bits of copper that fall into the slimes to still be in.electrical contact with the rest of the anode, so those cam be plated-out too.

How do you get to the gold and silver to re claim it

Would a thin copper sheet work to give a solid copper byproduct? Recyclers are not going to be impressed with the steel core. I like this process . There should be sufficient lead in the curcuit board solder to act as collector metal. Be cautious, solder can contain cadmium. Solar panels would deliver low voltage easily for this process. You're drawing less than 20 watts most of the time.

Curious - would circulating the electolyte help anything? Also, curious on the cost vs realized gain in $ figures - examples are fine.

What are the constituents of the black anode deposit? Does the anode attract other metals?

What state do you live in

The amount of time and energy used makes what ever you get out of it not worth it. Completely pointless.