Structuring of Ionic Liquids

This chapter discusses the structural ordering of ionic liquids (ILs), as well as its impact on some synthetic processes. For applications from catalysis to materials synthesis, and from electrochemistry to material separation, understanding the structure of ILs in the bulk liquid or at an interface is very important. It is also important to keep in mind that in these discussions of structuring, there are both timescales and length scales involved. Moving to increasing length scales, beyond that of the shell of nearest neighbors, the discussion of structuring in ILs relates to whether there is any structuring occurring at all and, if so, what is its morphology. Computational modeling is used to look the structuring of IL phases. Many of the conclusions of nanoscale ordering of ILs are based on X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques. The chapter discusses the use of different experimental techniques to probe IL structuring.