Our fire assay multi-pour equipment and tools are a vital component of the traditional fire assay technique by allowing improved operator safety, handling and improving productivity.
Fire assay is a quantitative method in which a metal can be separated from impurities by a crucible fusion with a suitably charged flux.
The process can be traced back to its use around 5,000 years ago for various precious metals.
Today, fire assay is predominantly used in the gold mining industry and still considered a reliable reporting standard due to the fact that all gold presented in samples is separated and collected and ready for final instrumental analysis.
Fire assay is a pyro-metallurgical technique that uses temperatures between 900C – 1100C and a fluxing charge consisting of some or all of litharge (PbO), soda ash (Na2CO3), borax (Na2B4O7), flour, nitre (KNO3), iron metal, fluorspar (CaF2) and possibly a few other minor chemical ingredients. This brings about obvious hazards into play, such as heat, lead handling, chemical handling and waste handling, which, also occurs in any chemical analytical digestion technique.
The furnaces, tools and waste extraction methods/equipment have evolved over time from minimal operator protection to our current high level of operator protection and combined with training and monitoring, provides a reliable and relatively inexpensive total gold analysis with risk minimisation.