I’ve done a lot of Google searches and can’t seem to find any information as to whether there is any solvent, either polar or nonpolar (or inorganic vs. organic), for which the solubility of sodium chloride exceeds that for water. Any chemists out there or anyone who has an idea about this?
Anhydrous liquid ammonia? Molten sodium?
salt has very strong ionic bonds. water is a very strong polar solvent. none better that i know of.
HOT water?
Other ionic salts in the melt?
I don’t believe that solubility is the property that you trying to measure in terms of the effectiveness of a given solvent. The solvent property, if I recall properly, is dielectric constant which measures the ability of the solvent to ionize the particular compound. In effect this has to do with the activity coefficient (too lazy and don’t have my textbooks at home) and the Debye-Huckel limiting law, etc.
In fact, salt dissolves slightly more in cold than hot water, unlike most solutes.
Molten NaCl?
I always though the opposite was true; according to this site (table near bottom of page), solubility is higher in warm water (Wikipedia says the same thing).
Also, molten NaCl is the same thing as sodium chloride so it doesn’t count.
You might be thinking of calcium carbonate, which is more soluble in cold water than warm. Sodium chloride is more soluble in warm water than cold.
I was going to suggest molten potassium chloride. I would expect that the NaCl-KCl phase diagram has a single molten phase. Probably cheating though since NaCl would be liquid also at those elevated temps and it is adifeerent situation from how we normally think of dissolving. Liquid liquid solubility is a different category from liquid solid solubility.
You might get some success with liquified HF. Highly polar amd the same exposed H+ions.
While solvents with a higher dielectric constant are more likely to dissolve polar substances, that’s not what the dielectric constant is a measure of. Relative permittivity - Wikipedia
In a theoretical sense I’m quite certain you are correct; however, in my posting I was referring to the fact that the dielectric constant of the solvent (ε) is used to define the mean ionic activity coefficient in the Debye-Huckel limiting law as defined here:
As I suggested earlier, what about molten sodium metal? Melts just below the boiling point of water, well below the melting/disassociation temperature of NaCl.