| Ionic liquids (ILs) are a new class of chemicals showing promise in many applications. Made entirely of ions, they are essentially liquid salts at room temperature with little to no perceptible vapor pressure. Highly customizable, ILs can be tailor made to function in many areas including solvents, battery electrolytes, catalysts, and gas storage and handling. IL research has greatly increased over the past few years and physical properties have been documented for many of them. Unfortunately, the number of unique ILs that have been created limits the amount of fundamental research conducted on them. This is especially true for liquid-liquid equilibria (LLE) data for systems containing ILs, water, and organic solutes.;A systematic, customizable methodology was developed for measuring the distribution ratios ( Di ) of six organic solutes between water and a hydrophobic IL solvent, tributyl methyl ammonium bis[(trifluoromethyl)sulfonyl]imide (([Bu3Me][Tf2N]). The method worked best for hydrophobic solutes benzene, chlorobenzene, and trichloroethylene ( Di = 127, 413, and 139, respectively). Acceptable results were also found for three hydrophilic solutes, butanol, hexanol, and methyl tertiary butyl ether ( Di = 1, 11, and 5, respectively).;Regeneration and reuse of IL was demonstrated for three of the solutes by reusing recovered IL and showing distribution coefficient were reproducible to within 5% of the original values.;It was also shown that the IL, while hydrophobic, had an average solubility of approximately 1160 ppm in water. |
