Precious Metal From Catalytic Converter

[Music] all right everyone welcome back to Cody's lab so today's project is something that I've been sitting on for quite a while and I'm finally getting to it in fact this video was supposed to go up before the Platinum from the road video give you an idea of just how long but anyway today I'm going to be extracting platinum and palladium from catalytic converters it's actually a little closer look what we got over here we've got three catalytic converters here one of which I've cut open so you can see inside see that there's the catalytic material there the material that was here there was that there's two sections in them and I just take the one out it's in this bag here but material that comes out of it looks like this it's a people call it honeycomb but it's actually got like squares so I wouldn't really call it honeycomb but it similar to that but the material is made of a zirconium dioxide ceramic with an alumina wash coat and the precious metals are in that outer wash coat now I have checked these with my x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and indeed I do see spikes in the data indicating platinum and palladium this box over here is some material that I actually purchased on eBay and it's a 10 pounds of ceramic from the catalytic converters and when I check this with the x-ray I see only a very little amount of platinum and almost no palladium this tells me that somebody ripped me off they had processed this prior to sending it to me so if you're buying stuff on eBay be sure to get intact catalytic converters that somebody hasn't already messed with I mean catalytic converters do lose material over time you know the exhaust reacts with the precious metals and it does lose a little bit over time but it doesn't lose this much anyway I think because of that I'm actually going to be omitting this from our go run here so we're just gonna have the material from I believe this is about five catalytic converters right here so we'll be able to see how much metal we can extract from that so the first thing we're gonna do is get the catalytic material out of the catalytic converter and you can either cut it open with a grinder which you can do but as a pain or what I'm gonna do for this one is take a rod firmly metal rod but this is a wooden rod it'll do and just to beat the material out of the converter [Applause] so I ended up cutting this one open because it was rather hard to rot out the two chamber design makes it rather difficult you can see it's got this stainless steel mesh surrounding the ceramic core we don't need any of that mr. onyx look we're after let's see if I can pry this out of there oh I broke it a little bit there you go looks just like that when it's intact one thing that I think is kind of cool you can do with this catalytic material is you can set it up then heat it with a blow torch just like this turn off the torch turn it back on without lighting it then you see that the spot stays hot because the platinum and palladium is reacting with the oxygen and propane actually causing it to burn without a flame see now it's cooled off almost completely it's headed again see if I'm gonna come back so no flame and it heats up so now it's just a simple matter taking this catalytic converter material stuff you get into this glass vessel here have a small enough to fit into the jug just throw it in there's no sense crushing it any finer and you need to if it's too big to fit well you're gonna have to break it up a little bit if I was a little smarter I might put on a respirator for this in fact you know what I think I'm going to who knows what this does to your lungs so as you can see all the catalytic converter material has been placed inside of the jar now it's time to make up the leach solution now the primary component is of course going to be water so I'm going to dump in enough of this distilled water to fill it up to the point where it covers the catalytic converter where's that all right that's probably just about what we need for the water so now I'm going to put in some hydrochloric acid I'll probably only need a few milliliters really to dissolve all the platinum group metals but there's going to be a lot of side reactions happening so I put in roughly a liter of acid just so that it remains in solution strong enough to dissolve the platinum group metals now this solution as is will not dissolve our precious metals it might dissolve iron and nickel but that's about it in order to get it to dissolve those other metals have to add an oxidizer in this case I'm going to be using a calcium hypochlorite which will make chlorine gas when it reacts to the hydrochloric acid chlorine gas will be trapped inside of the bottle and should dissolve into the liquid and we'll be able to oxidize the Platinum so that the hydrochloric acid can further dissolve it here we go I'm just gonna add it in a little at a time you see the bottle become a little bit yellow-green there as the chlorine gas is being involved you'll also notice I'm using a stopper which has been wrapped in teflon tape because the Teflon is a lot more resistant to the chlorine and then the rubber ever thought of being now I'll just kind of mix this around a little bit to get that chlorine gas to dissolve into the liquid and let it sit for a few minutes and then I'll add a little bit more it doesn't really need a lot of chlorine but there is a lot of side reactions happening so I want to have a quite a bit of an excess available let's go ahead and give it a second dose now there we go alright as looking pretty good the bottle still green so I'll probably leave it like this for an hour too before I add another dose probably only give it a couple more doses before the solutions saturated and chlorine here it is over in the sunlight so you can maybe see it a little bit better definitely see the chlorine gas just mixes around occasionally and that should dissolve the platinum and palladium so I can already see that the solution is changing color as it dissolves the precious metals that's a good sign yeah I'm gonna leave this sitting probably either outside or in my fume hood for about a week as in my testing I found that after about a week is where I stopped recovering any of the metal I've done some small-scale tests here chlorine some nasty stuff so I definitely don't want to store this anywhere where I'm gonna be living I'll see you guys and this is done alright so here we are I've had it sitting in the shade for approximately one week giving it a shake every now and then to make sure everything's stirred and so now with a majority of the platinum group metals should have been dissolved see down here the solution is a nice orange color indicating that it has indeed resolved some metals so now I've brought it out into the Sun so it can get a little bit warmer because I'm going to now release the excess chlorine now I'd like to have a scrubbing system set up so I can react that chlorine to neutralize it I don't have anything at the moment that I can do that with so for now I'm just gonna release this small amount of chlorine into the atmosphere it's small enough amount it really won't hurt much definitely stay upwind of it this and that should disperse and go react with maybe country or something so yeah I just let this sit in the Sun the heat will warm the solution and drive off the majority of the chlorine I'll probably let it sit here for a couple of days I'll see you guys then so here we are after letting it sit in the Sun for over a week most of the chlorine should be gone by now so let's actually pick it up and move it inside because I'm going to be putting it in a somewhat precarious situation and I don't want some amal to come knock it over okay there next to that glass cylinder the idea is that I'm gonna transfer the liquid from this into here and to do that I'm going to turn this bottle over so that it can drip down into this other chamber folder over here that's cut a few pieces of this stick it on there just to protect it that I've also made a little glass tube with a bend in it and a little filter on the end there this is to let the air back out so it doesn't create a vacuum lock so let's just stick that in there tape it into place try to break the glass probably didn't have to be glass but here we go okay I just let it drip out [Music] so here it is after adding some distilled water so I can rinse out the rest of the fluid I decided to pour off the strong stuff keep it separate at least for now I won't have to boil that down quite as much right so I've got some bad news the cat managed to get into my lab and well he's a bit on the rowdy side ended up losing most of the fluid it soaked into the concrete and of course the platinum group metals form insoluble complexes when they react with the carbonates so it's pretty much impossible to recover unless I actually chiseled up the floor which it's just not worth doing that I was gonna redo the video you know get some more catalytic converters and basically just redo the whole thing but it's been almost a year now and I still haven't I do still have some of the liquid and you know what the chemistry is all the same my yield will just be lower so why don't we go through and actually get the Platinum out I'm just gonna get this stirring just like that I'm gonna add some very fine copper powder this is to produce those metals into metallic form it's just a simple displacement reaction since copper is higher on the activity series than iron and nickel and stuff is it should only drop out the precious metals using the iron in solution Hey so here we are a few days later you should see that the copper has turned to a dark color and indeed it has the other metals have stuck to it now what I've done here is I replace the oxygen that was above the liquid with carbon dioxide this was to hopefully keep the copper from dissolving into solution if I have an oxidizer present along with copper salts and hydrochloric acid the copper can dissolve anyway let's get this taken back off and I would you siphon the liquid so that I can recover a little bit of metal that's settled down at the bottom okay there's mostly liquid gone you can see the black which presumably is my precious metals okay so now I've got most of the solution rinsed out let's put it over here into this flask now we should have our precious metals along with a bunch of excess copper now how do I dissolve out the rest of the copper without dissolving the precious metals well take a little copper sulfate and aqua ammonia now as long as I've got oxygen present in the air or perhaps balloon filled with pure oxygen now keep the ammonia from getting out as well should just be able to put it on the stir plate I'll leave it there for resolve okay so this has been going for a while now and I suspect at least the majority of the copper has been dissolved I mean yeah get as oxygen balloon this is no longer needed and I'm just gonna pour this back off into the beaker here let's see the solution is dark blue due to copper complexes with the ammonia but also kind of black due to the finely divided precious notes I guess it's all that's left now is to collect them together into a solid shiny button first thing for that of course is to wash out all of this copper solution it would probably make more sense to filter it [Music] there it is what the copper washed out now I can just take this and let it evaporate dry now on the home stretch let me just break this loose so it'll come out of the beaker as is this would probably make a pretty good catalyst so attempted to save it but I'm sure you guys want to see it melt it into a bead okay so I could melt it down probably mix it with some lead and do it cupellation but I actually don't have any crucibles clean at the moment so I'm gonna try smashing it into a pellet and see if I can melt it from there or I can lose a bunch of it that's also a possibility kind of already a bit shiny let's anneal it by warming it up with the torch well now that I beat on it a little bit it's no longer a super fine powder let's put it into one of these and actually melt it down all right that's probably good enough let's turn off the oxygen first let it cool under the reducing atmosphere now that it's cooled off let's see if I can bust that metal bead out of there I need beat of metal seal it weighs about a quarter of a gram not bad considering see if I can flatten it out a little bit it's pretty hard it's actually denting the steel so the x-ray results are in and my little bit of metal is 70 percent palladium about 10 percent platinum 5% lead 12% copper and a little bit of rodeo so about what you'd expect considering it's only about a quarter of a gram it's only worth maybe a few dollars at most of course I would have gotten significantly more maybe one to two grams had the cat not knocked over my fluids and maybe someday I'll try this again with better equipment and maybe some more catalytic converters till then hope you enjoyed I'll see you next time [Applause] [Applause] [Applause]

Channel: Cody'sLab

Views: 920,821

Rating: 4.8603587 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: UHStZrQ3OP4

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/GreyVersusBlue]

Cody: I'm putting it in this garage so no wild animals knock it over.

Cody's cat: Hold my catnip.