Upgrading of Commercial Ionic Liquids

For all research carried out with commercial ionic liquids we recommend a serious quality check of the product prior to work. As already mentioned, a good commercial ionic liquid may be colored and may contain some traces of water. However, it should be free of organic volatiles, halides (if not an halide ionic liquid), and all ionic impurities. 

To remove water, commercial ionic liquids used for fundamental research purposes should be dried at 60 °C in vacuo overnight. The water content should be checked prior to use. This can be done qualitatively by infrared spectroscopy or cyclovoltametric measurements, or quantitatively by Karl-Fischer titration. If the ionic liquids cannot be dried to zero water content for any reason, the water content should always be mentioned in all descriptions and documentation of the experiments to allow proper interpretation of the results obtained. 

Regarding the color, we only see a need for colorless ionic liquids in very specific applications (see above). One easy treatment that often reduces coloration quite impressively, especially of imidazolium ionic liquids, is purification by column chromatography/filtration over silica 60. For this purification method, the ionic liquid is dissolved in a volatile solvent such as CFF2C12. Usually, most of the colored impurities stick to the silica, while the ionic liquid is eluted with the solvent. By repetition of the process several times, a seriously colored ionic liquid can be converted into an almost completely colorless material. 

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