Quality Aspects of Commercial Ionic Liquid Production

Quality Aspects of Commercial Ionic Liquid Production 

With ionic liquids now commercially available, it should not be forgotten that an ionic liquid is still a quite different product from traditional organic solvents, simply because it cannot be purified by distillation, due to its nonvolatile character. This, combined with the fact that small amounts of impurities can influence the 

Ionic liquid synthesis in a commercial context is in many respects quite different from academic ionic liquid preparation. While, in the commercial scenario, labor-intensive steps add significantly to the price of the product (which, next to quality, is another important criterion for the customer), they can easily be justified in academia to obtain a purer material. In a commercial environment, the desire for absolute quality of the product and the need for a reasonable price have to be reconciled. This is not new, of course. If one looks into the very similar business of phase-transfer catalysts or other ionic modifiers (such as commercially available ammonium salts), one rarely finds absolutely pure materials. Sometimes the active ionic compound is only present in about 85 % purity. However, and this is a crucial point, the product is well specified, the nature of the impurities is known, and the quality of the material is absolutely reproducible from batch to batch. 

From our point of view, this is exactly what commercial ionic liquid production is about. Commercial producers try to make ionic liquids in the highest quality that can be achieved at reasonable cost. For some ionic liquids they can guarantee a purity greater than 99 %, for others perhaps only 95 %. If, however, customers are offered products with stated natures and amounts of impurities, they can then decide what kind of purity grade they need, given that they do have the opportunity to purify the commercial material further themselves. Since trace analysis of impurities in ionic liquids is still a field of ongoing fundamental research, we think that anybody who really needs (or believes that they need) a purity of greater than 99.99 % should synthesize or purify the ionic liquid themselves. Moreover, they may still need to develop the methods to specify this purity. 

The following subsections attempt to comment upon common impurities in commercial ionic liquid products and their significance for known ionic liquid applications. The aim is to help the reader to understand the significance of different impurities for their application. Since chloroaluminate ionic liquids are not produced or distributed commercially, we do not deal with them here. 

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