Separation of Gold Ions from Industrial Wastewater with Activated Carbon Prepared from Apricot Stones
Chemical Product Design and Engineering (CPD&E)
Chemical Product Design & Engineering - Poster (CPD&E - P)
Keywords: separation, gold ions, activated carbon, industrial wastewater
Gold solutions with concentration of 100 ppm or less are commonly encountered in gold using industries such as electronics, jewelry and electro-plating. In most commercial hydrometallurgical processes, precious metals are separated using the activated carbon as an adsorbent. In this work separation of gold from electro-plating wastewater with activated carbon was investigated. The required activated carbon was prepared from hard shell of Iranian apricot stones. It was found that the prepared activated carbon has high iodine number, very low ash content and large specific surface area that consists of a large amount of micro pores. Influence of several parameters such as amount and particle size of activated carbon, pH and agitation speed of mixing on the gold separation was studied. It was shown that the amount of activated carbon is the significant separation process parameter; however agitation speed on mixing in the range studied did not show considerable effect on final gold separation. Under the optimum operating conditions, more than %98 of gold was adsorbed on activated carbon after only 3 hours. It was found that activated carbon produced from hard shell of apricot stones has the potential to replace imported commercial activated carbons in gold recovery process.
