Ionic liquids for advanced materials

Ionic liquids have continued to attract huge interest in modern science and technology in the last decade. The early stages of ionic liquids research have mainly focused on alternative green solvents for traditional volatile organic solvents due to the low volatility of ionic liquids. However, benefiting from their designable structure and properties, ionic liquids have been developed, in recent years, as a multifunctional platform to produce new advanced materials applicable to many technical fields. In this mini-review, recent progress in the newly developed ionic liquids and their interesting applications as functional components in perovskite solar cells, seawater desalination, tunable nanoreactors, and advanced intelligent materials such as wearable photo-electronic devices and soft robotics have been summarized, and the existing barriers and future trends have been critically analyzed and highlighted. We hope that it could be a useful guide for the design and understanding of ionic liquid-based advanced materials, and thus, motivating the future research and development of new functional ionic liquids in the broad fields of advanced materials.