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