Low temperature and high pressure crystals of room temperature ionic liquid: N, N-diethyl-N-methyl-N-(2-methoxyethyl) ammonium tetrafluoroborate

Abstract

Crystals of room temperature ionic liquid (RTIL) are obtained separately at low temperature or under high pressure. The RTIL is N, N-diethyl-N-methyl-N-(2-methoxyethyl) ammonium tetrafluoroborate, [DEME][BF4]. At ambient pressure, low-temperature (LT) crystals appeared on slow cooling. By simultaneous X-ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) measurements, metastable monoclinic and stable orthorhombic phases coexist in pure [DEME][BF4]. Furthermore, the DSC thermal trace indicates that the metastable monoclinic phase was stabilized by adding water. In contrast, on compression process up to 7.6 GPa, crystallization is completely suppressed even upon slow compression. Direct observations using optical microscopy also support no crystal domain growth on compression process. High-pressure (HP) crystals at room temperature were seen only on decompression process, where two different kinds of crystals appeared subsequently. By crystal structure analysis, the LT crystal structures have no relation with the HP ones. Moreover, both metastable monoclinic phase at low temperature and higher pressure crystal has a folding molecular conformation and anti-parallel pairing of the [DEME] cation as the instability factors.