Smelting Catalytic Converters, Platinum, Palladium, & Rhodium

In today's video we are going to melt these

catalytic

converters

to try to recover the

platinum

, padium and

rhodium

, and this is the honeycomb-shaped ceramic matrix and the entire surface of this ceramic is impregnated with

platinum

, platinum and

rhodium

that acts as a catalyst , so when your exhaust goes through and it burns the unburned fuel and all the other stuff. The first thing we're going to do here is filter this down to what I think is 16 or 20 mesh. We're looking at maybe 50g here, so I'm. I'm going to add 50G of anhydrous borax, then we're going to add 50G of soda ash and then 25G of silica sand.

Now I'm going to add 25 G of bismuth oxide. This will act as our collector metal. I'm going to add some cooking flour, the cooking flour will act as carbon and when the carbon comes into contact with the bismuth oxide it will draw the oxygen out of the bismuth oxide and form CO2 and the bismuth will be reduced to metal and We will be able to make a alloy with our precious metals, so what will happen is a small piece of bisou metal will float in the liquid and it will stick to the platinum or the padium or the rhodium, once it's stuck it will form. an alloy with that, then you have a bismi platinum alloy, it will reduce the melting point and then it can be liquid and accumulate at the bottom of our Crucible.

We hope there are little bismo buttons here and there. oh, just a beautiful button, look how pretty and shiny it is, very pretty. 21 G, just what you'd expect if we reduced every bismum atom from that oxide, we'd end up with about 22 G, so we're there, it worked. very very well, let's hope that our platinum and rhodium are in this little button, so now what we're going to do with our button is put it in this cup, put it in an oven and heat it up. If it gets to about 1900 or 2000° Fah, the bismuth here will melt, react with the furnace oxygen in the environment, and oxidize the surface of the puddle.

Now the cup cannot absorb metal, but it absorbs metal oxides very well and the bismuth will continue to oxidize until the melting point of the alloy exceeds the temperature of the furnace and at that time the button will freeze, so in 50 g we got 033 G that doesn't look very good, does it well. I'm pretty disappointed with the last result, but I went home, did some reading and found an article experimenting with using piite as a precious metal scavenger and

catalytic

converters

, so let's do something similar, let's do something similar. take 50g of the catalytic converters we will add 50g of pyite and this is not 100% pyite so we will have a little bit of a loss so our mat layer gains.

They don't add up to exactly 50 g. I actually added 100g of borax just because it didn't look like I had much flux in there with only 50g, so I'm going to put it in a nice clean crucible back in the oven. I will smell it now in this document it says that 99% of platinum and padium can be recovered and 97% of rhodium can be covered by this method. I have my load in the oven, but let's talk a little about what's going on. here, iron and nickel are a big collector of Platinum Group metals and usually have to get very hot to melt the platinum and make it all pool at the bottom; something is happening with the iron sulfide, but you get the iron harvesting ability but the iron sulfide has a much lower melting temperature and we can do it in our propane furnace temperatures.

I can't give you all the details because I couldn't read the entire article, so if anyone has it please send it to I will leave a link in the description below where I got the items. I want to analyze the raw material and then I want to analyze the slag after I finish melting it and I want to make sure I don't lose anything. If my slag assays barely contain any precious metals, then I'll know it's all building up in that mat layer. PGM essays are super expensive, around $250 a piece, so if you want to support me, I have a patreon page or you can.

Thank you very much through YouTube because this is going to be very expensive and I am giving all this information for free. I would really appreciate it. The first fusion I made was just iron pipe, I didn't have any collectible metal. in it, so in 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 there and with that copper collector that's it. will end up on the mat as copper sulfide, but once I have that mat I can reduce the copper, forming a flux that will absorb the iron-rich sulfide mat and hopefully be left with a copper button with all of our precious metals that we then we can reduce in our roof furnace and recover a drop of precious metals and here is our pour with the 10 G of copper collector oh man look at that, that is just beautiful, beautiful mat, oh it's still pretty hot though man , that's nice and here's our scum.

Super glassy, ​​no beads or anything there, it smells perfect. Hopefully it works. So it's pretty easy to do, so the previous mat was 28. Here's the copper picker, so we should have about 38 40, so 40 G is that pencil. Pretty good and I hope there's half a gram of platinum and rhodium in there, well I'm really excited because we got two really good results, one with the iron stone alone and the other where I added a little bit of copper. They both have very good separation, but now I added the copper because I want to try to get the platinum out of the mat or at least the copper and platinum together, so I'm going to add 50g of anhydrous borax. add 50 g of soda ash, I'm going to add 25 grams of silica sand and then I'm going to add cloves to reduce everything to FES and that way the FES is soluble in the slag with the soda ash and our copper and our precious metals They should accumulate at the bottom like a molten metal pearl from which we can later refine precious metals.

We'll see what happens. I didn't see any metal coming out of there so I'm a little worried about that, ideally what would have happened is that the iron nails would reduce the copper to metal so we shouldn't have any mats. Oh, there's a bunch of mat that didn't work out very well, but we got our mat back. Well, we keep getting our really nice glassy scums, so we're doing something right there, but our mat didn't cooperate with 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 pretty hard, I've split it into a couple of different pieces to increase the surface area. I'll leave it overnight or a couple of days and see if it reacts with the water in the air and just crumbles and makes that dust that we've seen in the past, well, I can tell you we're finding a lot of ways that don't work. This is what happened to our mat after it sat for a couple of days. I expected it to fall apart, but still quite difficult, but this is what I wanted to happen. This is our copper free iron mat and once it is exposed to water and air it just breaks down into that dust which you can then recycle and reuse again, that's what I wanted to happen so there are a couple of things that could have happened here: one is that I put that whole piece of copper and iron mat right on top of the casting and ideally you would want it all powdered so you have a lot of surface area.

The other thing that could have happened is that maybe I didn't add enough soda ash to dissolve all of that or maybe I didn't give it enough time in the oven with the iron nails, but whatever it is, it's too hard, there are too many . things that can go wrong, so what I want to do now is 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 that we're going to use. I'm going to add I'm going to add 20 G that way we'll have enough money that even if we lose a little with the mat we'll have a button on the bottom, hopefully fingers crossed another nice clean crucible and Hopefully third time the charm here, okay, another Moment of Truth, cross your fingers, we have a silver bead here H, beautiful mat again.

I hope there's a little bit of silver here at the bottom, this matte cone, well, there's no silver, but I guess. On the plus side it shows you that the iron mat can dissolve precious metals, let's see how much this weighs, about 50g 51G the first time we got 28 with the copper we got 40 or 41 now we have 51 so it's all there, well . I'm going to try something weird. I'm trying to break this down to make it really nice and I can't do it, it's very very difficult, so I'm going to melt it again and pour it into water and make it very nice, so I can mix it again with a little bit of flux, use our iron nail trick and see if I can get my money back.

It looks like it worked well, let's do this one more time. We have 100 g of anhydrous borax, 100 g of sodium carbonate and 50 g of silica sand. I'm going to add our injected iron silver mat. In fact, I'm a little encouraged that all the silver is gone because that probably means he's collecting the platinum too. Now I'm going to smell this again. with iron nails, see if I can reduce the silver back to silver metal. Convert the iron mat into FES, which should be absorbed by our sodium carbonate. Rich scum before we look at our scum. I wanted to show you the nails I put there.

I initially put in these six and hopefully the mat was completely used and then the nails stopped biting. In this I added three more cloves about 20 minutes before pouring and they were not eaten at all. I mean, they look like normal nails, okay? Good feeling about this when I poured it I thought I saw a little ball of metal come out and not much here we go I think I see some metal in there hey it worked great stuff shooting everywhere so seems. really very good the silver button is nice and clean the slag goes all the way to the silver there is no matte coating the slag is nice and glassy I don't see any matting on the slag this is exactly what you want This is great I really got really excited about it this.

I put in 20 G of silver and we got 20 G back, so it's amazing, we got all of our silver back and hopefully our platinum group metals are alloyed with this silver. I know. Silver is a very good collector of that stuff and if this works, it will be just great. I have been thinking about this problem for years and we may have solved it well, finally it worked very well, we got our silver button. collector, we got rid of all the iron mat, hopefully we have all of our pgms collected on that silver button and nothing in the slag, so now what's going to happen is I have some samples here that I'm going to send for analysis.

Let's analyze them for platinum and rhodium. Stay tuned for part two because if this all works out I'll be scaling up and we'll be processing a bunch of catalytic converters so if you're interested check them out. Make sure you subscribe otherwise thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.