Could we have used HCl instead?

Question

That is the question I have for part of a chemistry lab, but here are the specifics on what exactly I'm talking about.

We dissolved a silver-copper alloy in nitric acid (HNO3) and added salt (NaCl) so that the silver from the alloy would form a silver chloride precipitate. The point of the lab was to filter this silver chloride precipitate out of the solution so we could find its mass, and then calculate how much silver was in the original alloy.

The question is, why couldn't we have only used hydrochloric acid (HCl) instead to dissolve the alloy and precipitate the silver? Would the alloy still dissolve in the hydrochloric acid so that only an AgCl precipitate forms?

How can you tell what it will dissolve in, and/or how effective it would be?

I don't know how our teacher would have expected us to know that, so I was just looking at solubility rules and didn't see the hydrogen combining with anything so I thought it would be okay... I don't know about dissolving alloys with acids...

Answer 1

Wouldn't work, simple because silver-copper does not disolve in HCL..... you need Nitric, or Mercury, or even HFL which is why ore processing leaves such nasty environmental effects..

Answer 2

The HCl would probably have taken much longer