Amalgamating

An amalgam is any combination or mixture of mercury with another metal or with an alloy. Most metals are soluble in mercury, but some; such as in the case of iron are not. Amalgams are commonly used in dental fillings. Mercury has been used in the gold and silver mining methods because of the convenience and easiness with which mercury will amalgamate with them. Gold and some of the minerals it bears are soluble in diluted solutions and cyanide alkalines. This property to the lixiviation of cyanide is one of the most common techniques of treatment for gold minerals. Gold is also soluble in other solvents, which give way to cite thiourea and thiosulphates in an acidy environment. In all the cases, it can be noted that in the presence of a solvent it is necessary that the attack solution has a potential of oxide reduction sufficiently elevated to be able to put the gold in the solution. The presence of an oxidizing agent is therefore indispensable; it is the oxygen of the air that plays the role in the case of cyanidation. Gold is in the end dampened by the mercury, since the tension of the surface between the gold and mercury is weak. This property is used in amalgamation known since a long time ago, used in past centuries on minerals and on gold concentrates. Amalgamation is a technique that is not utilized as much anymore because on one hand it does not allow the recovery of free gold and on the hand; it demands a very strict control of the environment and safety of those working around it. In cases where there is too much flour gold, like you will notice when working on a stream. One method of recovering gold in the past was to amalgamate it by placing a teaspoon of quicksilver in a pan, the gold and the sands were then stirred with a strip of black iron so that the mercury could come into contact with the little pieces of gold and this formed an amalgam. This was then separated from the other materials without any effort. It is not that simple to keep the remaining quicksilver though. Some of it was poured off and gathered in another container. There are some people that suggest adding a little drop of mercury into the concentrate so that it can then be picked out with the tweezers however; this should only be done in cases where a large amount of material is being worked on because a small amount will only give you a teensy little bit. Mercury also has a tendency of ruining the color of the gold which then makes it almost impossible to sell so using it is certainly not worth it when you are only dealing with a little bit of material.