We are given a mixture of two halides of potassium with a weight of 7.63g.
The mixture is dissolved in water and treated with an excess of AgNO3(aq).
5.64 g of precipitate is formed.
In the filtrate there are 0.1 mol K+ ions.
What are the name of the salts and what are their masses?
We are given a mixture of two halides of potassium with a weight of 7.63g.
5.64 g of precipitate is formed.
Situation 1. KF plus KX
In this case the reactions are:
KF(aq) + AgNO
3(aq)
AgF(aq) + KNO
3(aq) (in fact this is a little misleading. All the salts are soluble in water so all ions are free so it is a bit meaningless to talk about any one salt existing in preference to another)
KX(aq) + AgNO
3(aq)
AgX(s) + KNO
3(aq)
If AgX is the precipitate it could be: AgCl, AgBr, AgI (or even AgAt - but Astatine is a rare radioactive element - so let us ignore that possiblity)
Each of these silver halide precipitates has a different formula mass (relative molecular mass). So we cannot determine how many moles of the silver salt are formed
We can't deduce anything from the subtraction 7.63g - 5.64g because we are subtracting the mass of an insoluble silver salt precipitate from the original mass of potassium salts.
We can't deduce anything about the original number of moles from the original mass 7.63g of potassium salts because we don't know the salt KX and we don't know the relative amounts of KF to KX.
In the filtrate there are 0.1 mol K+ ions.
So there were 0.1 mol of K
+ originally - but we don't know how much of this was in the KF and how much was in the KX.
With situation 2: the salts KX and KY (neither X nor Y are Fluorine), we still cannot deduce moles of the original salts since the mass of the precipitate is composed of unknown ratio of AgX and AgY.
So my thought at this stage (I may have missed something) is there is insufficient information in your original question for there to be a unique answer. We could add information, such as "there are equal number of moles of the two potassium salts in the original sample" and try to see if we can solve the problem with a unique solution. If this is not enough then keep adding further information for example
Salts are: KF, KCl
Salts are: KCl, KBr
Salts are: KCl, KI
etc.
If adding this further information means
1. You can calculate a solution
and
2. Each solution for different "additonal information" gives a
different answer, then you can be pretty certain the original problem does not have enough information to result in a unique solution
However, if the you calculate the answer for the different pairs of salts and you keep coming up with the same answer , the some of the data you added was unnecessary.
Try it. Also re-read the original question to see if you forgot any data.
Clive