Low toxicity functionalised imidazolium salts for task specific ionic liquid electrolytes in dye-sensitised solar cells: a step towards less hazardous energy production

Abstract

Tandem evaluation of ionic liquids and imidazolium salts toxicity and performance in dye sensitised solar cells is presented.

Brønsted acidic ionic liquid-promoted direct C3-acylation of N-unsubstituted indoles with acid anhydrides under microwave irradiation

“…Thus, developing new catalysts for the synthesis of 3acylindoles with excellent yields and high selectivity under mild and environmentally friendly conditions is highly desirable. 18 Ionic liquids have received much attention in many elds including catalysis, [19][20][21][22][23][24][25] electrolytes, [26][27][28][29] extraction desulfurization, [30][31][32] biomass processing, [33][34][35] and biodiesel. [36][37][38][39] Friedel-Cras C3-acylation of indoles using ionic liquids has been reported in previous literature.…”

The optimisation of dye sensitised solar cell working electrodes for graphene and SWCNTs containing quasi-solid state electrolytes

“…To resolve the above problems, alternative components such as ionic liquids (ILs) have been investigated as a replacement for volatile organic solvent based electrolytes. ILs have good chemical and thermal stability, negligible vapour pressure, non-flammability and high ionic conductivity (Matsumoto et al, 2001) and can be tailored to produce good performance with low toxicity (Ghavre et al, 2014). However, the power conversion efficiencies obtained with ionic liquids at AM 1.5 solar irradiance have been lower than those achieved with organic solvent-based electrolytes (Wang et al, 2003b).…”

Chronic effects of the ionic liquid [C4mim][Cl] towards the microalga Scenedesmus quadricauda

“…However, membrane disruption is most significant in imidazolium ionic liquids with long side-chains (Petkovic et al, 2011;Couling et al, 2006), exemplifed by [C 8 mim] ILs and is less important in short-chain ILs, e.g. [C 2 mim] which have low toxicity (Ghavre et al, 2014). The current mechanistic understanding of biological effects is still developing, but tends to focus heavily on more toxic [C >4 mim] examples, for which significant effects on metabolism, enzyme activity and growth have been described (Stephens and Licence, 2012).…”