Electrolytic Gold Cell Part 2

welcome back to part two of the electrolytic gold refining cell series of videos this is a double refined pure gold bar and I've decided that we're going to use this for the cathode instead of the titanium pieces that I bought because I'm not quite sure what's in this alloy we're going to use this bar as the anode bar this is from a recent video where i re-purified a gold disc we've got 58.2 grams and what I'm going to have to do is figure out a way to suspend This Bar in the electrolyte that will be in this beaker and what I think we're going to do is I've got two 14k scrap gold rings I'm just gonna take these cut them apart like this and what we'll do is take this down to My Jeweler friend spread these out with a pair of pliers and then have him weld these on to the anode bar and then use these to suspend that's kind of thin that'll still work to suspend our anode in the electrolytic gold refining cell this is better left to a professional really hard enough yeah the whole block of gold so you got to concentrate the heat on the bar in order to get the solder to stick to it I got you see I wouldn't have been able to do this too there it goes it pulled up into a ball again didn't it that's why I want a professional to do it I just keep melting that thing over and over but Bob until it turned into a Big Blob good you think that's gonna be all right like that this bar will be suspended in the electrolyte I'm going to use these two dog ears that he's welding on right now to suspend the bar and electrolyte there it goes man I've seen it all right we're just gonna keep rolling this through the uh roller here and down on it a little each time the electrolyte that we made in part one we're going to begin the experiment by filtering the electrolyte once we get all the electrolyte pulled through this filter what we'll do is get our electrolytic gold cell setup I think what I'll do is this heating unit up and put it into one of my casserole dishes got a spotless 150 milliliter beaker drop in a magnetic stir bar here's our anode bar that we're going to use in the electrolytic gold cell I've bent the little dog ears that we've welded onto it so that it will hang on the edge of the beaker I was going to use this thinly rolled High Purity gold as the cathode but I think what we're going to do we're going to go ahead and try the titanium turbine blade as the cathode for the gold cell this is the brand new power supply that I bought on eBay I think it was about 80 bucks came with these leads so we're going to do a mock assembly right now and just set it all up and get it configured like we want it to run our electrolytic gold cell red bleed is the positive lead and we're going to hook that to the anode bar like so and this is why we're doing a mock assembly to make sure that uh everything is going to go smoothly because it never does all right there we go now we just gotta find a way to keep that cathode protruding out into the cell got the mock assembly complete and I think this is going to work okay be able to see the uh the pure gold forming on the cathode at this angle what I want to do is fill it up to electrolyte to about right here and then we're going to add hydrochloric acid what I don't want to do is feel it so full that it hits the little dog years that we have welded on there and dissolves them and then the anode drops away so we got to keep the electrolyte off of these little dog ears so now let's take this apart here's our electrolyte gold chloride solution with about 25 grams of pure gold dissolved in aqua regia fill the cell up with the electrolyte to just below that line right there I'm gonna put the anode bar in here now and what we want to do is add some hydrochloric acid we've got about 10 percent free hydrochloric acid and here we go I'm going to add hydrochloric acid to the electrolyte I'm going to add some heat start heating the electrolyte up if this level gets too high I can pull some electrolyte out of there and add it back into our flask so we can adjust the level to get the proper level for the uh cell operation all right we got 127 Fahrenheit 53 Celsius the book calls for 140 degrees Fahrenheit so we're almost ready to go let me set this back out of the way here's our titanium cathode see if I can hook this anode bar up boiling it got 134 degrees I'm gonna call that close enough turn the heat down just a touch because it's rising now we're going to put in our titanium cathode and I don't know what's going to happen here I hope this works cathode and now we're going to energize the power supply over here I've got the power supply turned completely down so that there's no current flow here we go I'm going to start adding a little bit of voltage says the book calls for one and a half volts eight point one point six that's close enough got four amps going through the cell so we should start getting some action here I do see blackening on the cathode see that starting to turn dark and I can see um material forming around the edges of the cathode in there I believe we're starting to get a result here the anode bar looks different now that we're passing the current through it we've got the current flow set at 1.6 volts and that cathode the titanium cathode is definitely picking up something there's something forming on there now they're scared of this experiment I didn't know how that titanium cathode was going to work but apparently looks like we're gonna be okay so far this is going pretty good for me you can see the gold is starting to form on that cathode in there looks like little nodules of gold and the anode bar is corroding away nicely for me see that we've got the voltage set at 1.6 volts and we're running four and three quarter amps through the cell this is about uh let's see I started this about 10 minutes till we're almost a half hour into it I think this is going to work out pretty good I think I've got the right temperature setting on here got about 142 degrees Fahrenheit 61.2 Celsius this is about an hour and a half into the process started at about 10 minutes to 12. and uh it's looking real good if you notice the amps have dropped way off so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to add a little bit of our gold electrolyte just to touch the amps up just a little bit a little bit of hydrochloric acid that that improves the conductivity as well so we're going to add about just a little bit of hydrochloric acid just a few drops and that will increase the conductivity through the cell s to have worked fairly well for me that titanium cathode performed so far anyway you can see here they anode is nearly all gone corroded by the electrolytic action of the cell been adjusting the temperature here you can see we've got the temperature about 144 Fahrenheit 62.2 Celsius and what I'm going to do I'm going to try a little experiment here I'm going to try to crank the voltage a little bit and see if we can alter the crystal structure that amps really jumps up when I increase the voltage got a half five amps going through there now at 2.1 volts all right there's two and a half volts six amps going through the cell I don't know how this is going to affect what's going on inside of there with the voltage turned up like that I do see a little difference going on in there some sparkly specks of gold forming look different from the nodular stuff that's uh depositing on that titanium cathode I'm not sure what this is going to do to my gold looks like it's turning color a little bit what we'll do is turn this voltage back down a little bit it's close enough what does anode completely corrode away then we'll get our cathode that's coated with high Purity gold out of there we'll give it a look you can see the anode bars corroded away and it looks like a looks like a shark's tooth and the uh the cathode the titanium cathode performed well looks awesome down in there I think what I'm going to do as a experiment here at the end time right now is 20 minutes to two for almost two hours to get this far into it what I'm going to do is I'm going to crank the the voltage here and get it up around seven amps oh there's eight nine well we better watch it there too high now look at the anode corroding away literally dissolving away with that high current flow it's taking about two and a half hours to get this far we started at 10 to 12. about 10 after two and if you look down here you'll see that the uh anode has lost its footing no longer clipped onto the edge like I had it that's probably because of the weight reduction see the anodes just almost completely dissolved now let's turn the heat off the stir bar off now what we'll do I'm gonna secure the power supply and I'm gonna pull the gold up out of here get the rest of this anode bar out of here before it falls down into the electrolyte there's the anode bar like a shark's tooth let's see how we're gonna do this smooth this over out of the way push my power supply back out of the way best I can make some room and we're going to pull the electrolyte down off of the uh Source here now let's take a look at the cold that we've accumulated on the cathode let's go ahead and rinse electrolyte off of here let's see what the bag looks like the back's even got some old sticking to it I just hope we didn't glue the gold firmly to the cathode all right here is our High purity electrolytically refined should be about four nines fine pure gold go ahead and rinse this off real good again make sure we got all the uh electrolyte rinsed off of it set this over here for right now I'm gonna take this this is our electrolyte I'm going to add it to this 600 milliliter beaker get in a hurry make mistakes you can see this still got some electrolyte on it let's get this stir bar up out of here let's go ahead and put this back in to this beak Rod rinse that cleaned it out real well just gonna let this soak some distilled water to try to get all the electrolyte off of there this is going to be gold so I'll save that put it in my paper storage all right let's get down in here and see how hard this is gonna be to get that goal to release from the cap load titanium cathode just just a bamboo skewer tonight I'm using here let's see how hard it's stuck yeah it's stuck in there pretty good there we go I just keep working with this until I get the gold to uh let go completely that's what it looks like underneath let's move this out of the way and make some room for the electrolyte in this Beaker and what we'll do now so I'm going to add some stump out and recover the gold that we used for the electrolyte stump out is sodium metabisulfite I'm just going to add a spoon of it into the electrolyte we're going to precipitate out the pure gold this should be high Purity gold about like three quarters of an ounce it's set this over here out of the way and now we'll bring our go back up continue working on it and try to get the uh to get the gold off of the Catholic that's one bad thing about using the titanium it's not really sticking to the cathode but it's just a hard formed gold there you can see that's coming off real easy the back there because it's real thin but this thick stuff up front is really sticking pretty good to it only because it's metal that's formed around the titanium cathode it's not actually sticking to the titanium is just formed around it a hard crust that's hard to get off of there having to resort to using a stainless steel spoon something that's firm enough to be able to break the gold apart so it can come off of the cathode there we go we got it off here's our high purity four Nine's fine gold amazing looking it's solid metallic gold that has plated out onto the cathode could melt this up into a pure gold bar just like it is we go let's put our four nines gold and a melt dish cooperate cooperate let's take it over here to the Melt table we're going to melt this up a nice little ingot out of this High Purity gold foreign ultra high Purity gold absolutely beautiful electrolytically refined in our gold cell we've got 45.6 grams in this ingot and we've also got some other gold here that we recovered this is the uh gold that I rolled out to try to make an ammo bar that was pure gold there's 57 grams and then we've got the uh gold that I precipitated from the electrolyte that we used to refine our pure gold ingot it's probably going to be about 25 or 30 grams up pure gold in here as well all right this will conclude the video like to thank everyone for watching

Channel: sreetips

Views: 828,335

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Id: vV6hxI1FQNA

Length: 35min 18sec (2118 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023