Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) constitute a rapidly emerging class of sustainable liquids that have been widely studied and employed in chemical separations, catalysis, and electrochemistry. The unique physico-chemical and solvation properties of DESs can be highly tailored by choosing the appropriate hydrogen bond acceptor (HBA) and hydrogen bond donor (HBD). Understanding the role of the HBA and HBD on the multiple solvation interactions in DESs is important to enable their judicious selection for particular applications. This work constitutes the first study to exploit chromatography to measure solute-solvent interactions of DESs using a wide array of known probe molecules. The constituent components of 20 DESs, formed by ammonium and phosphonium-based salts and carboxylic acids, are systematically modulated to delineate the contribution of the HBA and HBD towards individual solvation properties. Solute-solvent interactions measured in this study are used to interpret and explain the performance of DESs in desulfurization of fuels and extraction of natural products. The results from this study can be used to predict and understand the performance of DESs in various chemical processes where solvation interactions heavily influence outcomes.

The effect of chemical structure on various physiochemical properties including thermal stability, solvent miscibility, magnetic susceptibility and viscosity is studied for acetylacetone based magnetic ionic liquids.

Ultra-high thermal stability perarylated ionic liquids as gas chromatographic stationary phases for the selective separation of polyaromatic hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls,

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Jared Anderson for his supervision and guidance during my time here at Iowa State University. I am grateful for the knowledge I've acquired over the three years in the Anderson group. I'd also like to thank my committee members: Dr. Venditti and Dr. Anand for their support, feedback and time. I'd like to thank current and former

Porous graphitic carbon (PGC) columns for liquid chromatography (LC) represent an alternative to octadecyl‑bonded silica columns for the separation of both polar and nonpolar molecules. This is accomplished by exploiting the polarizability of the stationary phase interacting with the functional groups of the analytes. However, the elution of nonpolar compounds requires a high percentage of organic solvent, losing the intrinsic advantage of reversed‑phase aqueous separations. In this article, we aimed to exploit an additional advantage of such columns, viz. the resistance at high temperatures. Superheated water was employed as the mobile phase, taking advantage of the decrease in water dielectric constant by increasing the temperature. In this context, our goal was to minimize the percentage of organic solvent utilizing high temperatures (up to 250 °C) to achieve fast and “green” separations. The new developed high-temperature LC instrument was applied to the analysis of parabens in food samples.

The sample analysis and data interpretation is the most challenging step of fire debris analysis, due to the presence of combustion and pyrolysis products in the substrate material. In this study, a headspace solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) procedure was applied to the extraction of combustion and pyrolysis products from three commonly used carpet substrate materials, made of nylon 6,6 and polyesters. Each carpet sample was burned with and without two different ignitable liquids (ILs), i.e., gasoline and kerosene, and the Total Ion Chromatograms (TICs) and Extracted Ion Profiles of characteristic class compounds of ILs were obtained and compared to those of unburned neat ILs, using gas-chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS), to study the possible interferences of these substrate materials in fire debris analysis.