Abstract
The water solubility of salts is ordinarily dictated by lattice energy and ion solvation. However, in the case of low melting salts also known as ionic liquids, lattice energy is immaterial and differences in hydrophobicity largely account for differences in their water solubility. In this contribution, the activity coefficients of ionic liquids in water are split into cation and anion contributions by regression against cation hydrophobicity parameters that are experimentally determined by reversed phase liquid chromatography. In this way, anion hydrophobicity parameters are derived, as well as an equation to estimate water solubilities for cation-anion combinations for which the water solubility has not been measured. Thus, a new pathway to the quantification of aqueous ion solvation is shown, making use of the relative weakness of interactions between ionic liquid ions as compared to their hydrophobicities.
Highlights
IntroductionThe presumed discovery of the first ionic liquid by Walden [1] took place in 1914
The presumed discovery of the first ionic liquid by Walden [1] took place in 1914. It took over 80 years for the bloom of ionic liquid research to appear, starting with the discovery of a new class of air and water stable ionic liquids by Wilkes in 1992 [2]
In the context of green and sustainable chemistry, there is a vision of a molecular design of ionic liquids which would combine technical advantages with a set of favorable properties like ready availability and low risk for health and environment [16, 17]
Summary
The presumed discovery of the first ionic liquid by Walden [1] took place in 1914. After that, it took over 80 years for the bloom of ionic liquid research to appear, starting with the discovery of a new class of air and water stable ionic liquids by Wilkes in 1992 [2]. It took over 80 years for the bloom of ionic liquid research to appear, starting with the discovery of a new class of air and water stable ionic liquids by Wilkes in 1992 [2] It will maybe take another 80 years to realize the full potential of these substances, or, as Uwe Vagt (BASF) put it at the Intertech. Because of the good correlation found within this dataset (see below), we complemented our water solubility data with data from the scientific literature
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