There are two ways to extract gold, one is pyrometallurgy: firstly, the ore is crushed, separated and enriched by heavy sand, and then refined in the furnace.
The second method is to extract gold by electrolysis: dissolve gold in ore with sodium cyanide solution, and then extract gold by electrolysis. In this way, the purity of gold can reach 99.9%.
What are the raw materials for refining gold?
Gold is mainly used in jewelry and general manufacturing (such as electronics and computer industry). Because of its excellent thermal performance, electrical conductivity and oxidation resistance, the computer industry uses hundreds of tons of gold every year.
Precious metals exist almost everywhere in computer components, such as processors, motherboards, expansion cards, memory DIMM and so on. Of course, the amount of each part is very small. However, with the soaring price of gold in recent years, many places are recycling old electronic components and computer parts to extract gold from them.
Experiments show that every ten mobile phones can extract one gram of gold, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it is actually very terrible. That is to say, a ton of mobile phones can extract almost 300 to 400 grams of gold, which is basically equivalent to dozens of times the same amount of ore.