Hydrophobic deep eutectic solvents consisting of decanoic acid and various quaternary ammonium salts are presented and evaluated as extractants.

Perturbed-Chain Statistical Associating Fluid Theory (PC-SAFT), a physically based model that accounts for different molecular interactions explicitly, was applied to describe for the first time the phase behavior of deep eutectic solvents (DESs) with CO2 at temperatures from 298.15 to 318.15 K and pressures up to 2 MPa. DESs are mixtures of two solid compounds, a hydrogen bond donor (HBD) and a hydrogen bond acceptor (HBA), which form liquids upon mixing with melting points far below that of the individual compounds. In this work, the HBD is lactic acid and the HBAs are tetramethylammonium chloride, tetraethylammonium chloride, and tetrabutylammonium chloride. Two different modeling strategies were considered for the PC-SAFT modeling. In the first strategy, the so-called pseudo-pure component approach, a DES was considered as a pseudo-pure compound, and its pure-component parameters were obtained by fitting to pure DES density data. In the second strategy, the so-called individual-component approach, a DES was considered to consist of two individual components (HBA and HBD), and the pure-component parameters of the HBA and HBD were obtained by fitting to the density of aqueous solutions containing only the individual compounds of the DES. In order to model vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE) of DES + CO2 systems, binary interaction parameters were adjusted to experimental data from the literature and to new data measured in this work. It was concluded that the individual-component strategy allows quantitative prediction of the phase behavior of DES + CO2 systems containing those HBD:HBA molar ratios that were not used for k(ij) fitting. In contrast, applying the pseudo-pure component strategy required DES-composition specific k(ij) parameters.

Hydrophobic deep eutectic solvents were used for the first time for the removal of metal ions from non-buffered water. It was shown that the extraction occurs via an ion exchange mechanism in which all transition metal ions could be extracted with high distribution coefficients, even for high Co concentrations and low DES/water mass ratios. Maximum extraction efficiency could be reached within 5 s and regeneration was possible.