Preg-robbing of gold in chloride-bromide solution

One of the major issue in gold chloride leaching is a tendency of gold to either precipitate or adsorb on a carbonaceous matter in an ore, i.e. preg-robbing. This paper discusses issues related to a preg-robbing phenomenon in gold hydrometallurgy, specifically in gold chloride-bromide leaching. This phenomenon has been observed in the 1800s to decrease gold recovery during gold chlorination as well as the state-of-art of gold cyanidation processes. The experiments were conducted in order to study the preg-robbing phenomenon in chloride-bromide media. The tendency of preg-robbing was demonstrated by adding carbon in a non-preg-robbing ore. It was shown that the preg-robbing tendency in the chloride-bromide media was very strong. Addition of 0.01% w/w of carbon powder into the non-preg-robbing ore decreased gold recovery from 92 to 70% and addition 5% w/w of carbon decreased gold recovery to almost zero