PGM refining | Johnson Matthey

[Music] Johnson mafia is the world's largest secondary refiner of platinum group metals we have developed highly advanced processes for extracting and separating platinum group metals or pgms from products so advanced we can refine to a purity of 99.95% with refining sites and trade operations in europe north america and asia we offer complete refining solutions with a full refined supply cycle our technical support teams work with our customers to provide the best possible refining options as well as being the world's largest recycler of pgms we're one of the only companies able to undertake full seven metal separation helping you to recover platinum palladium rhodium iridium ruthenium silver and gold we process a wide range of feeds from spent process catalysts and auto catalyst scrap to secondary mine residues and jewelry products and with our precious metal management support we offer a completely tailored service to help mitigate risk in volatile markets refining is a highly complex process which requires a deep understanding of material science pyro metallurgy multistage chemical separations and analytical science our process involves four steps evaluation smelting chemical leaching and chemical separation evaluation is a critical stage in our PGM refining process during this step we determine the materials PTM content and agree with a customer the quantity or value of PTM will return to them as well as establishing the lead time material tracking is crucial all customer batches are uniquely bar-coded to ensure full traceability during evaluation we are able to process bulk material to generate a representative homogeneous sample from which we can accurately determine the PGM content through a saying metallic feeds undergo multiple meltings to evenly distribute their constituents and a small sample is produced for laboratory assay for other customer feeds generally in a powder form the pgms and other components may not be evenly dispersed across the whole batch and the material may not be of equal particle size therefore during evaluation we grind the material first to reduce and equilibrate the particle size and then blend it to produce a homogenous dispersion of components from which we can take a sample for a saying in this way our assay were yield a true representation of the bulk material spent process catalyst feeds are thermally treated to remove any residual organic solvents before moving to the grinding and blending steps materials typically undergo several grinding stages to reduce the particle size and we have a range of crushers ball and pan mills for this the entire batch is then blended in our cone blenders we then begin scaling down the full batch by relative weight percentage to produce a smaller sample for our saying this smaller sample is further blended in a drum blender before being passed through a spinning riffle splitter which separates the feed into non via samples of nominal 1.6 kilograms one of these samples is then sift ground to a finer particle size blended and separated once more into 16 smaller samples three of which are assayed in our laboratories samples can also be sent to our customers or their nominated third party for comparative measurement against our assay in the labs a complex series of melting and chemical processing steps transform the powdered and metallic samples into samples for analysis spectroscopic techniques are used to accurately determine the PTM content of the customer's original material at this stage we agree the final contractual terms with the customer [Music] once terms are agreed feeds are no longer handled on a customer by customer basis but are combined into larger batches for smelting in this pyrometallurgical process the material is melted at temperatures of over 1,200 degrees for around 12 hours in large reverberatory furnaces to separate the nonmetallic components at the end of a smelting cycle the furnace is tapped and the nonmetallic slag portion is sampled and poured off first the PGM containing portion is then collected and a sample is analyzed to check the PGM concentration this PGM bullion undergoes additional processing in our smaller furnaces to further concentrate the PDMS prior to chemical leaching two types of bullion feed are produced a silver based feed containing primarily platinum and palladium with trace amounts of rhodium iridium and ruthenium and an iron based feed which contains all five of the PDMS [Music] the two boolean feeds then move to our chemical leaching plant where they undergo multiple leaching x' to further concentrate the PG M's into solution the silver base bullion is suspended in concentrated acid to slowly leach the silver platinum and palladium into solution and separate out any gold which is sent for further refining silver is removed and further treated to make products used in a variety of applications a resulting concentrate of platinum and palladium is then dissolved in strong acid the iron based bullion is also acid leached but follows a different chemical treatment route given the different solubilities of the five pgms that it contains at this stage we have the two distinct liquid feeds which both pass to the final refining step chemicals separation [Music] chemical separation is a highly complex multistage process that converts the five pgms into their final product forms commonly a PGM sponge it involves a series of solvent extraction evaporation dissolution precipitation and filtration steps to produce highly pure organometallic salts of each bgm these salts then undergo several heat treatment steps to reduce them to the final pure metal we pride ourself on our ability to refine the full suite of precious metals through a wide variety of customer feeds containing a range of PGM concentrations as a result following evaluation customer material may be introduced into the refining cycle at various stages and feeds are continually recirculated to ensure we deliver the very highest levels of PGM separation [Music]

Channel: Johnson Matthey

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Rating: 4.891892 out of 5

Keywords: Science, Technology, Innovation, FTSE100, Refining, Recycling

Id: Ix9xfF3QgRw

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 24 2018