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Posted: **Sun Aug 20, 2023 9:46 am**

Of interest?
https://insideevs.com/news/682472/ev-battery-recycling/

Posted: **Sun Aug 20, 2023 9:41 pm**

OK, I take it that a "water-based solution" means dissolving the whole lot in acid (or alkali)! No problem, that might be the best way to get the ingredients into an extractable/recoverable form. Maybe another chemical stage to precipitate out stuff like iron, but after that...

I remember from many decades ago that a way of diagnosing the contaminants in an electro-plating bath was to put a sample in a special cell with a square cathode - or maybe anode - under particular voltage or current conditions, then turn it through 90 degrees and continue the programme. I think you got different colour patches in specific places which identified different metals from their electro-chemical behaviour. I don't see why something like this couldn't be adapted to recover valuable metals. I'm sure gold and silver will be recovered from PCBs etc this way.
Interestingly, https://www.catmag.co.uk/article/uks-fi ... ant-opens/ suggests that "black mass" is produced - which sounds like a co-precipitate of all sorts of crap!

Posted: **Sun Aug 20, 2023 11:10 pm**

‘ many decades ago”

Many decades ago, I used to analyse substances by wet chemistry methods - gravimetric, volumetric, flame photometry, colorimetry and some other methods. There are much more modern techniques available these days. X-ray fluorescence and diffraction have been common methods for several decades.

Gold is the easy one to separate. It doesn’t dissolve in normal acids, so what is left is finally dissolved in Aqua Regia (or hydrochloric acid plus an oxidising agent such as chlorine) before then being precipitated by a reducing agent (usually a sulphite).

Mass spectrometers are the common go-to for analyses, these days, in metallurgy.

The water based solution is used to simply dissolve the Group 1 metal Lithium, during the comminution process, so no lithium fires to deal with.

Floatation and sedimentation, along with likely some magnetic separation would remove a fair amount of material by physical means, leaving just a few fractions to be separated by chemical means.

Posted: **Mon Aug 21, 2023 12:41 pm**

Oliver90owner wrote: ↑Sun Aug 20, 2023 11:10 pm ‘ many decades ago”

Many decades ago, I used to analyse substances by wet chemistry methods - gravimetric, volumetric, flame photometry, colorimetry and some other methods. There are much more modern techniques available these days. X-ray fluorescence and diffraction have been common methods for several decades.

Gold is the easy one to separate. It doesn’t dissolve in normal acids, so what is left is finally dissolved in Aqua Regia (or hydrochloric acid plus an oxidising agent such as chlorine) before then being precipitated by a reducing agent (usually a sulphite).

Mass spectrometers are the common go-to for analyses, these days, in metallurgy.

The water based solution is used to simply dissolve the Group 1 metal Lithium, during the comminution process, so no lithium fires to deal with.

Floatation and sedimentation, along with likely some magnetic separation would remove a fair amount of material by physical means, leaving just a few fractions to be separated by chemical means.

agreed, I worked out of a chemical lab and one of the jobs was to analyse plating shop solutions... titrating acid into a strong caustic/cyanide solution is fun! It was a carefully worked out method though, using lots of Canning's special reagents, maybe some that we made up from a recipe.
But the point was that the plating shop could do the metal contaminant assessment without needing sophisticated wet chemistry, I suspect it dated from the 1920s or even earlier.
Where I worked later they had portable hand-held XRF which was brilliant (not for plating solutions, obviously!)

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