Mentrax Refinery provides the most efficient and accurate assaying services in the gold dealership industry. As a world class gold Refinery with a state of the art technology and excellent human resource, mindful of our reputation and with a quest to offer impeccable products and services competitive on the global front, gold assaying forms a … Continue reading Assaying
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Mentrax Refinery provides the most efficient and accurate assaying services in the gold dealership industry. As a world class gold Refinery with a state of the art technology and excellent human resource, mindful of our reputation and with a quest to offer impeccable products and services competitive on the global front, gold assaying forms a critical part of our operations.
Through this process, we carefully analyze the metal composition to either determine or establish a specific product specification.
To make this determination, the purity and composition of your product, being it gold dore bars, jewelry, chip or scrap lots, the specific gold product would be melted and then sampled. Each sample is clearly identified as to customer and lot number. With this sample, we are able to determine the content of the metal via a fire assay or the use of X-ray fluorescence (XRF).
Fire Assay
Fire Assay, also known as cupellation, is an age-old process and is about the main industry standard for precious metals assaying. This process analyses all of the lot or just a sample from a homogeneous melt of the lot. The whole product or just the sample along with silver is wrapped in lead foil and placed in a porous bone-ash cupel and melted. The lead foil pulls the base metals into the cupel leaving a gold and silver dore bead. After treating the dore bead with nitric acid to remove the silver, the remaining precipitate is dried and weighed to obtain the concentration of the precious metal. This is a time-consuming process and typically takes about 1-5 hours to complete depending on the quantity to be fire assayed.
XRF/ X-Ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy
X-Ray Spectroscopy uses the phenomenon of fluorescence to determine the concentration of elements in a sample extracted for the assay. Fluorescence is the phenomenon in which the absorption of a specific wavelength of energy (X-Rays) by a material results in a re-emission of radiation of a lower energy. This difference in energy is measurable and is characteristic of the atoms present in the material. The primary advantages of this method are that it is non-destructive and is very fast to deploy.
Mentrax Refinery gold assaying certifications are very credible because we adhere to trust, honesty, transparency, respect and integrity as our organizational hallmarks. For this reason, major gold buyers, Sellers, brokers & mandates, jewelry vendors and most industry players rely on Mentrax Refinery assaying to verify the authenticity or exact true component of their gold.