Precious Metal Recovery & Refining System

The system is specified for any operation that generates, collects or trades precious-metal-bearing material and wants to convert it into saleable certified metal on its own site.

• E-waste and PCB recycling plants — recover gold, silver, palladium and copper from dismantled boards, connectors, pins and component scrap instead of selling them as a low-value concentrate. Output: Au / Ag / Pd / Cu bullion and cathode.
• Urban-mining and WEEE consolidators — upgrade mixed and shredded electronic fractions into a smeltable precious-metal alloy on site. Output: granulated PM alloy plus separated plastics and aluminium.
• Precious-metal refineries and assay houses — add a recovery front end so low-grade customer material can be processed in-house rather than blended or rejected. Output: 99.99% bars and shot.
• Spent-catalyst reclaim plants — extract Pt, Pd and Rh from palladium-on-carbon, reforming, petrochemical and fine-chemical catalysts. Output: high-purity PGM powder and sponge.
• Automotive catalyst processors — recover platinum, palladium and rhodium from three-way catalytic converter monoliths. Output: PGM sponge and ingot.
• Copper, lead and zinc smelters — recover contained gold, silver and selenium/tellurium from anode slime, flue dust, slag and dross. Output: Au / Ag bullion plus Se / Te by-product.
• Electroplating and surface-treatment shops — treat spent plating baths, drag-out and rinse water on site and return the metal to production or sale. Output: recovered metal powder plus polish water for recirculation.
• Jewellery, dental and mint operations — recover gold and silver from filings, sweeps, sprues, polishing dust and floor residues. Output: 99.99% Au / Ag bars.
• Battery and black-mass recyclers — recover precious-metal fractions and the copper/silver content of pre-treated battery residues. Output: mixed PM concentrate and copper cathode.
• Solar-PV recyclers — recover silver from silicon-cell and contact pastes generated by panel-recycling lines. Output: silver powder.
• Photographic, X-ray and fixer processors — pull silver out of spent fixer, effluent and imaging residue. Output: silver crystals and powder.
• Mining and small-scale concentrators — refine gravity concentrate, loaded carbon and doré into market-grade bullion. Output: cast doré and refined gold.
• Universities, laboratories and pilot plants — bench and pilot-scale lines for process validation, teaching and small-batch refining. Output: analytical-grade purified metals.

Steps 1 — Feed Sorting, Sampling and Assay. Incoming material is weighed, inspected, sorted by type and representatively sampled, then screened by XRF and assayed by fire assay to establish true metal content and lock in the correct route for the batch. Output: assay report, sorted feed and a batch route sheet.

Steps 2 — Mechanical Liberation and Physical Separation. Sorted feed is dismantled, shredded, crushed and milled to free the metal from plastics, fibre, ceramics and aluminium, then classified by screening, magnetic separation, eddy-current separation and air classification into a metal-rich fraction and clean non-metallic streams. Output: metal-rich concentrate, plus separated plastics/fibre and aluminium granules.

Steps 3 — Thermal Conditioning and Smelting Enrichment. The concentrate is pyrolysed and carbonised to drive off organics, then — where grades demand it — smelted and converted at 1200–1500 °C with flux so base metals report to slag while the precious metals collect in a molten alloy, which is water-broken into uniform granules. Output: granulated precious-metal alloy and disposable slag.

Steps 4 — Leaching and Gold Stripping. Alloy granules, slime or catalyst feed are dissolved in corrosion-resistant titanium, glass-lined or PPH reactors using gold-stripping chemistry, aqua regia, chloride/chlorine or nitric parting, bringing the target metals into a pregnant solution while gangue stays as residue. Output: precious-metal pregnant liquor and leach residue returned to enrichment.

Steps 5 — Selective Separation and Recovery. The pregnant liquor is clarified on filter presses and vacuum filters, then split into individual metals with P204 / P507 / C272 solvent extraction, activated carbon and ion-exchange columns, cementation, selective precipitation and electrowinning for the most dilute streams. Output: single-metal purified solutions, raffinate returned to leaching.

Steps 6 — Electrolytic Refining and Casting. Each purified stream is finished electrochemically — Wohlwill-type cells for gold, high-current-density cells for silver, rotating-cathode and pulsed electrowinning for PGMs and copper — then the refined powder or cathode metal is dried, fluxed, melted in induction furnaces and cast or vacuum-cast into bars, granules and shot. Output: Au / Ag 99.99%, Pt / Pd ≥ 99.95% bullion and PGM sponge.

Steps 7 — Off-Gas, Effluent Treatment and Assay Verification. NOₓ and acid-mist scrubbers, condensers, an alkali-pH polishing loop, wastewater neutralisation and residue dewatering treat every emission and bleed stream, while finished bars are re-assayed by fire assay and ICP-OES against the Certificate of Analysis. Output: certified product, compliant emission and recirculated water.

• Standard warranty. Twelve (12) months from commissioning, or an agreed equivalent operating-hours period, on all structural, mechanical and electrical equipment against defects in material and workmanship.
• What the warranty covers. Replacement of defective components, repair or exchange of main-process equipment, and free remote technical guidance throughout the warranty period. Consumables, and damage caused by misuse, unauthorised modification or operation outside the agreed feed and process envelope, are excluded.
• Guaranteed performance. We warrant that, when fed material inside the agreed assay and throughput envelope and operated to the supplied SOP, the line meets the contracted product purity and recovery figures verified at commissioning.
• Response commitment. Guaranteed remote response within 24 hours, on-site engineer dispatch and hotline support for breakdowns affecting production, and expedited spare-parts supply.
• Spare parts and consumables. Genuine spares, electrodes, membranes, ion-exchange resin, activated carbon and extractant reagents are held as a stocking range to minimise downtime.
• Lifetime technical support. Free access to our engineering team for process questions after warranty expiry, plus optional retrofit, capacity-upgrade and reagent-optimisation services.
• Documentation. Full operating, maintenance and safety manuals, electrical and P&ID drawings, spare-parts catalogues and training material accompany every plant.
• Compliance support. Assistance with local emission and effluent permitting documentation, and with the assay and product-certification records your buyers and authorities require.