Selection of a suitable salting out agent:

The general criteria for the selection of a suitable salting out agent are

i) It should increase the activity of the distributing species.

ii) It should have strong ability to bind to water molecules thereby depleting the aqueous phase of the water molecules to complete.

iii) It should not itself extract in the organic phase to an appreciable extent.

iv) It should preferably increase the extraction of the metal of interest not the impurities.

v) It should be easy to remove or destroy the reagent from the aqueous phase for further processing.