Analysis
A large quantity of sample (between 2 and 5 kg) is digested or leached with cold sodium cyanide (NaCN) solution (generally 0.1% NaCN), for one to several days (depending on the assay laboratory involved). The gold is dissolved through its formation of a cyanide complex, which is concentrated through the solvent exchange process into an organic solvent and subsequently analyzed. The use of large sample weights and solvent extraction enables low detection limits, as low as 0.1 ppb. The digest is analyzed for Au (0.01 ppb), Cu (0.01 ppm), Ag (0.5 ppb), and depending on situations, for other elements. However, gold values in BLEG are lower than total assays such as those of fire assays, as it analyzes only the fine grained gold fraction and largely ignores coarser and nuggety gold.
If the need arises, a separate split of the original sample is used for pathfinder elements.
Read more about this topic: Bulk Leach Extractable Gold
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)