Ionic Liquids and Green Process Engineering

Ionic liquids (ILs) have been studied extensively as green solvents, catalysts, and electrolytes due to their unique properties and great potentials in green chemistry and chemical engineering. We focused on the investigation of ILs from fundamental research to process design. We found that H-bond in ILs showed the covalent feature based on the molecular dynamic simulation and experimental characteristic, which has been defined as a new concept of Z-bond.¹ It was also found that Z-bond interactions made a great contribution to the ionic clusters. We revealed the mechanism of synergistic catalytic effect by Z-bond and ionic clusters composed of several ions or molecules.² The new force fields including Z-bond model has been developed, as well as the formation and regulation rules of ionic clusters in different concentrations of aqueous solution have been studied. The methodology of IL-based process design was proposed, which was applied to develop several novel green process technologies³, including the coproduction of ethylene glycol and dimethyl carbonate, the efficiently catalytic alkylation process, a green spinning process from wool keratin, new ILs electrolytes for lithium ion battery.