Ferric chloride hot and concentrated almost to syrup will dissolve silver metal, along with many base metals copper iron and so on, the silver forms silver chloride AgCl and because of the high chloride concentration along with the solubility at these higher temperatures, we can get the silver chloride AgCl to go into solution as AgCl2, which when diluted and cooled will reprecipitate AgCl.
Quote from Wikipedia on silver chloride:
AgCl dissolves in solutions containing ligands such as chloride, Silver chloride reacts with these ligands according to the following equation:
AgCl(s) + Cl(aq) --> AgCl2(aq)
Basically one of the ways that I have discussed how I reuse my waste solution from old cupric chloride leaches.
ferric chloride works well with a few types of ore to recover gold or silver...
FeCl3 works great for dissolving copper or brass as part of a process of recovery of silver contact points and other materials...
Although you could work sterling silver or other silver using ferric chloride, I hate silver chloride and avoid creating it anywhere possible.
ferric chloride can be regenerated and reused similar to how cupric chloride can.
Iron in a solution likes to easily form other oxidations states some of which are not all soluble, these are not normally a problem, for example, silver will not alloy with iron, or the gold will dissolve in aqua regia or other solution leave most of the insoluble iron behind...
Jmk88,
The fifteen questions that people ask you back is for a reason.
It is how we communicate with each other and solve problems.
Like why did your homemade nitric acid not work well on silver?
Like how did you separate the home nitric acid from your potassium sulfate salts?
How are you going to treat the waste?
Because you do not answer the questions or choose to ignore them you do not learn why we cannot discuss why, or you will not even learn why you are asked these questions.
Sometimes the question is to get you thinking.
Sometimes the question is to find out how much you understand or do not understand, so we can help.
Sometimes the questions are to start a discussion to find out what the problems are, to troubleshoot...
There are many reasons we ask you questions back, in order to help.
You seem to be very good at asking questions of us, but not very good about answering the questions we ask in turn, in order to help you...
When you ignore these questions, you do not find out the answer to the question, or of why the question was even asked, and the discussion cannot be a two-way question and answer, and you do not learn the answers, and you spend a week trying to learn some kind of answer.
So not to cause you any further confusion, I will not ask you to consider answering any of the 15 questions back. I say this with "loving positive energy" but if you do decide to answer our questions maybe we can have more of a two-way conversation, or question and answer session where we both can learn from it.
