Solvatochromic Parameters of the Binary Mixtures of Imidazolium Chloride Ionic Liquid Plus Molecular Solvent

Imidazolium-based chloride ionic liquids (ILs) have exhibited remarkable performance in several important applications such as biomass dissolution and extraction, but their large viscosity is a non-negligible problem. Adding molecular co-solvents into chloride ILs is effective in reducing viscosity; nevertheless, understanding of the accompanied change of thermodynamic polarity is quite few. Therefore, in this work we reported three Kamlet-Taft solvatochromic parameters, including dipolarity/polarizability ( *), hydrogen-bond acidity ( ) and hydrogen-bond basicity ( ), for the binary mixtures of several imidazolium-based chloride ILs plus either dipolar protic solvents (water and methanol) or dipolar aprotic solvents (dimethyl sulfoxide, N,N-dimethylformamide and acetonitrile). The results demonstrated that those parameters could be altered by the structure of IL and type of co-solvent owing to the solute-solvent and solventsolvent interactions. The structure of alkyl chain of cation had considerable impact on the * variation of IL aqueous solution against IL concentration but hardly affected other mixtures. Moreover, remarkable preferential solvation of probes was observed for and in the mixtures of IL and dipolar aprotic co-solvents, whereas the hydrogen-bond interactions between IL and dipolar protic co-solvent enabled the preferential solvation to be alleviated and resulted in more linear variation of and against the molar fraction of IL. The results not only contribute to a better understanding of the effect of co-solvent on imidazolium-based chloride ILs, but also are instructive for improving the thermodynamic performance of IL-based applications via providing IL+co-solvent mixtures with desirable physicochemical properties.