Recovery of Platinum from HDD Platter.

Platinum is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust and has an average abundance of approximately 5 g/kg. It is the least reactive metal. It occurs in some nickel and copper ores along with some native deposits, mostly in South Africa, which accounts for 75% of the world production. The chart shows the region wise production of platinum.

Due to it properties platinum finds use in various industries , the below chart shows the percentage division of the demand in each sector in yar 2011. The industrial sector had highest percentage of demand with usage in Nitric acid industry , petroleum , electronic components , medical , sensors , hard disk , dental , glass and silicones .

The need for modern computers to store very large amounts of information has brought a rapid increase in the use of platinum to improve the data storage capacity of hard disks.

The first hard disk drive, introduced by IBM in 1957, used fifty disks, each measuring 24 inches in diameter, to store just 5 megabytes of data. Nowadays, PC hard disks are available which can store 125 gigabytes (125,000 megabytes) of data, and capacity is increasing all the time. Manufacturers aim to continually reduce the average number of hard disks in each drive, so technology which can offer denser data storage is eagerly sought after. A hard disk drive looks and operates much like an old fashioned record player. Information is recorded and retrieved by a magnetic head mounted on a movable arm, which hovers over a rapidly spinning disk. Each drive contains one or more disks; the disks in desktop PCs are usually made of aluminium, whereas high quality glass is often used for disks in laptop computers. The disks are coated with a cobalt based alloy which has magnetic properties. This magnetic layer stores individual pieces of data, or "bits", in a series of circular tracks. The amount of data which can be recorded on a given surface area depends largely upon the strength of the field generated by the magnetic layer. Adding platinum enhances the magnetic qualities of the cobalt alloy, enabling data to be stored at higher densities and improving access times. Information storage requirements continue to expand at rapid rates, fuelled by the growing use of computers for video and audio applications. Today, all hard disks contain platinum in their magnetic layers, compared with around 50 per cent in 1997. The proportion of platinum in the magnetic alloy has been increasing steadily over time, from less than 10 per cent five years ago to over 35 per cent, on average, today.[2]

It is estimated that of the entire platinum production about 32% is recycled , of which platinum from auto-catalyst forms the major part . The Table below shows the amount of platinum recycled in ounce.

Platinum recycling in 2010 in oz Auto catalyst 1095 Electrical 10 Jewellery 735 Total 1840

Taken from platinum 2010 Interim Review , Johnson Matthey

With increasing pressure to recycle the platinum various process had being defined to recover the platinum purely and economically . The most of method being reported are from spend auto catalyst using various techniques like liquidliquid extraction in chloride medium[3], using anion resins [4] ,by pressure cyanidation [5]. The use of microorganism to recovery of precious metals (biosorption) has also being reported [6]and reviewed [7] . In this report the technique of recovering of platinum from hard disk Platter is being discussed . In this experiment platter is reacted with HCl solution saturated by 20% Cl and Pt is recovered as chloroplatinic acid . It is checked for Pt by Spectrophotometric Analysis using Anthranilic acid as reagent at 500 nm .[8] References 1 2 http://www.platinum.matthey.com/applications/industrial-applications/hard-disks/
3 Roberta Santos Marinho , Julio Carlos Afonsoa, Jos Waldemar Silva Dias da Cunha Journal of Hazardous Materials 179 (2010) 488494 4 P.P. Sun , J.Y. Lee , M.S. Lee , Hydrometallurgy 113114 (2012) 200204 5 Jing Chen , Kun Huang , Hydrometallurgy 82 (2006) 164171 6 Sung Wook Wona, Juan Maob, In-Seob Kwak , M. Sathishkumar , Yeoung-Sang Yun , Bioresource Technology 101 (2010) 11351140 7 Nilanjana Das , Hydrometallurgy 103 (2010) 180189 8 Spectrophotometrie Determination of Platinum Anthranilic Acid as a Reagent, A. K. MAJUMDAR and ,I. G. SEN GUPTA , Department of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry, Jadavpur University, Calcutta-32 (India)