[Grondgeralder]

Was thinking of an invention. Probably done to death but eh. It good for sciencefiction.

When you put salt and some sugar in the same bowl of water. Both the sugar and salt ions will look for equal saturation indepandantly. A selective osmosis machine tries to fool salts to move or not to move because of special filters.

So if you tried the same with metals with an osmosis machine of some sort that makes use of dialysis or electrolysis, there should be a way to fool iron and all the other ions so that they won't pass to the collecting electrode. A device that only allows gold salt to accumulate.

Perhaps you could build a pod with a little powersouce and place it in a spill or an old encachment and have it run for a few weeks to see if it would collect any gold from dissolved salts.

[Bertus_Nel]

If i understand you correctly, you want to extract Gold from Gold salts? ie Sodium aurothiosulfate etc, ? or are we talking in a "precious metal" environment sense that you want to extract gold from other metals? Sorry Gremlin, i see this in a few ways..   

[Grondgeralder]

I think even ocean water has dissolved gold in it in minute quantities.

Yah, I think you could build a device that does water purifiation while doing extractions, especially in iron ladden spills.