Assaying, Microscopy, Mineralogy & XRF/XRD

Assaying, Microscopy, Mineralogy & XRF/XRD

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Fire assay fusions with a bismuth flux (2 replies)

Marshal Meru
6 years ago
Marshal Meru 6 years ago

We are currently doing our fire assay fusions with a bismuth flux based recipe. I am curious about a stable bismuth recipe. We are using 60 parts sodium bicarbonate/20 parts bismuth recipe. I am curious if the sodium bicarbonate is too much, and I would like suggestions as to other reagents that would stabilize our duplicate sampling. There seems to be less reliable results from our current flux recipe vs a lead based flux. I am new at working with bismuth.

Thank you!

T
Todd H
6 years ago
Todd H 6 years ago
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1 like by David

Asarco did a lot of work on this back in the 1990's.  Bismuth has been looked at for a long time and has not been generally employed mainly do to cost.  They actually had a patent on the method.

I am not sure what reagents would stabilize the recipe, it really depends on what the issue is - not enough bismuth reduced to alloy the precious metals, interferences....

 

Have a look at this patent as it provides some recipes that may be helpful.  Unfortunately fixing this issue is going to involve a lot of assay tests and it will be variable with ore types.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5279644

Todd

Todd Harvey - Global Resource Engineering http://www.global-resource-eng.com

C
mamabear8709
2 years ago
mamabear8709 2 years ago
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We are currently trying to switched from lead flux to Bismuth. We are also trialing how to find the best recipe. What can we do? 

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