Novolyte's butyl diglyme offers an economical, efficient, and environmentally-friendly method of extracting gold (III) chloride from a variety of sources, including ores, concentrates, anode slimes, cathode sludges, electrolytic plating operations, and gold coated electronic parts.
Butyl diglyme's advantages include:
- Nearly quantitative yields (>98% of high purity gold, 98–99.99wt%)
- Very selective for gold (III) chloride; if present, platinum and palladium will also dissolve and can be recovered by extraction and precipitation
- Cost of butyl diglyme consumed in the process is approximately $.50/oz of gold
- Energy requirements for the butyl diglyme process are 0.3% of those for traditional electro/pyrolytic processes
- Butyl diglyme is easily recycled with minimal material losses and without degrading its extracting performance
- Suitable for large or small scale operations
Butyl diglyme is a selective solvent for the extraction of gold from hydrochloric acid solutions containing other metals. Treatment of the extract with hydrogen or oxalic acid reduces the trivalent gold to gold powder. One variation of the process has been demonstrated in large scale continuous operation to recover 99% of the gold at 99.99% purity.
Scrap metal containing gold is treated with aqua regia, extracted with butyl diglyme and the pure gold released from the glyme with potassium oxalate.
