Making Sense of Enthalpy of Vaporization Trends for Ionic Liquids: New Experimental and Simulation Data Show a Simple Linear Relationship and Help Reconcile Previous Data

SP Verevkin and DH Zaitsau and VN Emel'yanenko and AV Yermalayeu and C Schick and HJ Liu and EJ Maginn and S Bulut and I Krossing and R Kalb, JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY B, 117, 6473-6486 (2013).

DOI: 10.1021/jp311429r

Vaporization enthalpy of an ionic liquid (IL) is a key physical property for applications of ILs as thermofluids and also is useful in developing liquid state theories and validating intermolecular potential functions used in molecular modeling of these liquids. Compilation of the data for a homologous series of 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethane- sulfonyl)imide (C(n)mimNTf2) ILs has revealed an embarrassing disarray of literature results. New experimental data, based on the concurring results from quartz crystal microbalance, thermogravimetric analyses, and molecular dynamics simulation have revealed a clear linear dependence of IL vaporization enthalpies on the chain length of the alkyl group on the cation. Ambiguity of the procedure for extrapolation of vaporization enthalpies to the reference temperature 298 K was found to be a major source of the discrepancies among previous data sets. Two simple methods for temperature adjustment of vaporization enthalpies have been suggested. Resulting vaporization enthalpies obey group additivity, although the values of the additivity parameters for ILs are different from those for molecular compounds.

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