Gsracer, ok, so I will use 5ozt to start, how much nitric..?
Depends on conditions and temperature. Meaning if the nitric is reduced only to NO2, or all the way to NO. One electron vs. three electrons. This could make a huge difference.
I would advise to do it like this:
Start with 1:1 ratio (weight of Ag to volume of 65% nitric) - this empirically work for me. Dilute nitric with equal ammount of distilled water, get it on hotplate and heat it until all of the nitric is throughly consumed. It may take several hours to acomplish this. Do not allow the solution to boil as much as you can. Boiling wastes acid. But sometimes it is hard to regulate the hotplate to do the thing as you want it to do
Then, decant the pregnant liquid to another container. You know, that in that solution, there is no free nitric. You will most probably end up with some leftover silver. To this add just small volume of nitric (diluted as in previous step) and repeat. It is much quicker to do it like this.
If you consume all of the nitric from the first dose, and add additional nitric into the pregnant solution, it ends up very diluted = reaction with leftover silver, even at boiling point will be much slower.
You can also stop the dissolution after spending the first batch of nitric, wash the remaining leftover silver with distilled water, and substract the undissolved silver from the ammount you started. If it isn´t much, it won´t make such a difference in making electrolyte. You will only make few dozen mL less
Or start with more silver, and you satisfy your needs in terms of AgNO3 quantity in one shot.
Personally, I don´t like "precise" shooting the ammount of nitric to just dissolve the silver. Excessive boiling, heating, occupying space in my fumehood... When I am left with just a bit of silver, say like under 20g, I either wash it and add it back to the pile, or crank the ammount of conc. nitric just to dissolve it quickly
In my situation, I couldn´t have beakers left on the stove overnight.
