Ionic Liquids: Simple or Complex Electrolytes?

Abstract

Ionic liquids belong to the most investigated systems in the recent years and this field is still significantly growing with an increased focus on developing ionic liquids for specific applications, along with fundamental research. In the present featured paper the similarity and differences between common, "classical" electrolytes and common surfactants and ionic liquids along with the surface-active ionic liquids are discussed in order to stress their significance and point out on their weak points. A short survey of the literature data reveals namely that ionic liquids in solutions behave like "classical" electrolytes and can be described by existing models in the range of their validity. There is still a lack of models describing well the concentrated electrolyte solutions and here ionic liquids, less limited by solubility as common electrolytes, can serve as model systems. The micellization of surface-active ionic liquids in aqueous solutions can be described in the same way as for common surfactants, but surface-active ionic liquids offer more possibilities to study specific ion and isomer effects. They are also quite promising systems to study the aggregation processes in non-aqueous solutions.

Analytical Modeling of Thermodynamic and Transport Anomalies of Water

“…To be able to do this the model will have to be upgraded to version to include also charges on the water test particles, but this will add new parameters. Another challenge in theoretical modelling lies in developing the same kind of theory for other compounds like ionic liquids 55 , alcohols etc. We are expecting that all this can be done.…”

“…Recently this theory was extended to 3D MB model 38 and later parametrized to describe properties of experimental water. 54 In this paper, we made review of analytical modeling for MB model of water, its properties in bulk which are starting point to develop the theory for solvation of polar and nonpolar solutes, important for example in self-association of surface-active compounds such as ionic liquids, 55 protein folding, etc. The outline of the paper is as follows.…”

Imidazolium-Based Ionic Liquids: Some Research Methods, Applications and Physico-Chemical Properties

“…Thus, according to the Web of Science database, only for imidazolium-based ILs for a period from 2017 to today, about 1400 papers have been published (see Figure 1). Furthermore, M. Bešter-Rogač in their study, [8] asked one intersting question, whether ILs are simple or complex electrolytes. In that paper, M. Bešter-Rogač discussed the similarities and differences between common "classical" eletrolytes and common surfactants and ILs and the surface-active ILs to stress their significance and point out on their weak points.…”

The Influence of Ionic Liquids on Micellization of Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate in Aqueous Solutions

“…[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] However, the presence of organic electrolytes usually affects these parameters in much more dramatic way if their hydrophobic chains can penetrate the micelles, 13 as was already observed for many other surfactant systems. [14][15][16][17][18][19][20] For an investigation of these effects, ionic liquids (ILs) as the most studied organic electrolytes in the last decades 21,22 seem to be the most appropriate. Because of their bulky cation and anion structure over which the charge is distributed by the resonance, they tend to be liquids at temperatures below 100 °C.…”