Tribological properties of alkyl sulfate ionic liquids have been evaluated; hydrophobicity of ionic liquids significantly influenced the tribological characteristics and combination of phosphonium cation with hydrophobic octafluoropentyl sulfate anion afforded good ionic liquid that showed excellent tribological performance.Ionic liquids (ILs) are a new class of fluids and interest has been growing in their application in diverse fields of science and technology.1,2 The tribological properties of ionic liquids have attracted increased attention in recent years since Liu and coworkers 3a first reported the possible use of these compounds as a lubricant, because of their low volatility and flammability. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] ILs generally show outstanding thermo-oxidative stability, this property being particularly important for lubricants that are used under extreme conditions.
13Alkyl sulfate ionic liquids are very economical and have broad potential in their molecular design.2c However, little attention has been given to their application as lubricant to date. We recently reported the successful design of hydrophobic alkyl sulfate ionic liquids using fluorine chemistry; 2e the hydrophobicity of alkyl sulfate imidazolium salts was dependent on the content ratio of the fluorine to the alkyl sulfate anion and 2,2,3,3,4,4,5,5-octafluoropentyl sulfate (C5F8) imidazolium salt showed perfect hydrophobic properties, 2e while non-fluorinated pentyl sulfate (C5F0) salt showed a strong hydrophilic nature. 2c,2e In this paper, we report the results of evaluation of alkyl sulfate ionic liquids as lubricants.Tribological properties for our three types of original ionic liquids, i.e. 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium pentyl sulfate was 25 Â 7 mm made of SUJ2 steel (JIS). Friction force was monitored throughout the test and the data were converted to friction coefficient. Two tests were run for each set of test parameters, and differences in the results were less than 15%.Both imidazolium salts showed good lubricant properties that were lower than those from perfluoropolyether (PFPE), 13 which is widely used as a lubricant for head/disk interfaces or micromachines. However, a significant weak point was foundwas not constant during the experiments, it initially increased and then decreased with rubbing ( Figure 1). It was assumed that the friction became constant after 1000 s. owing to the reduced contact pressure by wear.On the contrary, no fluctuation of the friction coefficient was observed for [bmim][C5F8] (Figure 2). Since [bmim][C5F8] has perfect hydrophobic properties, no rust was found on the surface of the ball and disk; this provides a constant friction coefficient. The results suggest that hydrophobic ionic liquid is appropriate as a lubricant.It has been pointed out that reaction of iron metal with phosphorous forms a stable boundary film composed of iron phosphate and this generally contributes to an improvement in tribological properties.4 Therefore, we next tested ionic liquid2g as a lubricant under the sa...