What is liquefying?

liquefaction is a metallurgical process in common use starting about 600 years ago. It is a way to separate valuable metals from ores that are a mixture of two or more valuable metals, the process of heating ore until the metal with the lower melting point forgives. Cleaning of metals returns to antiquity, while the methods for cleaning gold are traced back to 6,000 BC. The liquening process is not exceeded so far, because it works well with certain types of natural alloys and it is a specialized process.

Until the 13th century, it was known that there were only seven metals in nature: gold, silver, mercury, can, can, iron and lead. Until the beginning of the 17th century, metallurgical practice for the separation of metals from ore is most often involved in the introduction of carbon or hydrogen compounds into the furnace. Germany began in the 16th century extensive use of liqueur practice to separate silver from copper, when Georg Agricola described the procedure of likvitation in its book 1556, about the nature of metals .

The two earliest uses for liqueur was the separation of silver from copper with lead as a solvent and to remove the tin from several types of minerals. In order to work, the use of air must be performed when using lead, because lead would not serve as a suitable solvent and would be divided into litharge, otherwise the earthy, poisonous solid with the PBO chemical formula. For this reason, liquefaction cannot be performed in a regular melting furnace.

Metallurgical processes for liqueur results initially only in partial separation of alloy metals. A typical copper cut alloy can bring liquid lead, which still contains 1-3% copper, 10-30% lead and the rest as silver. The process continues until sufficient silver is present in the culmination of the mixture, then the mixture is then zero or further improved at the bottom of the furnace. Then another metallurgical method is known as drying, essentially an extension of the likvitation process to removegreater lead from the remaining silver.

Although it seems simple and simple, the liquefy process is lengthy, requires special furnace conditions and can result in ambiguous results in terms of the final percentage of metal. The metal is also lost in the process as a slag, and thanks to this and the length of processing the liqueur has now been replaced by more efficient metallurgical methods. During the Renaissance period of history, however, liquefaction was so useful for its massive production of silver that it was said that it competes for the invention of the press printing to importance and is attributed to the revival of large parts of the European economy 15.-16. century.