Long length-scale organisation in mixtures of hydrogenous and fluorous ionic liquids

Supported ionic liquid phases (SILPs) - ionic liquid (IL) films deposited on a high-surface-area support - are a proven strategy for catalysis, but little is known about optimising the IL for this purpose. It is easy to make new ILs and check their properties, but this is wasteful and ineffective, and it is better to tune IL properties by making mixtures, e.g. ten compounds could make 100's of mixtures. We want to understand, and hence be able to predict, how the properties of the mixtures vary with composition and we are interested in mixtures of ILs where one contains a hydrocarbon and chain and the other a fluorocarbon chain. This leads to a structuring of the liquid film which can affect how the catalyst works and we need to get to the point where we can predict how the mixture composition determines the liquid structure. Neutron scattering can answer these questions for us.

支撑离子液体相（Supported ionic liquid phases, SILPs）——即沉积于高比表面积载体上的离子液体（ionic liquid, IL）薄膜——是一种已被证实的催化策略，但针对该用途优化离子液体的相关知识却知之甚少。制备新型离子液体并检测其性质虽简单易行，但这种方法既浪费又低效；相比之下，通过制备混合物来调节离子液体性质更为可取——例如，十种化合物可形成数百种混合物。我们旨在理解并进而预测混合物性质如何随组成变化，且重点关注由两种离子液体构成的混合物：其中一种含烃链，另一种含氟碳链。此类混合物会使液膜形成特定结构，而该结构可能影响催化剂的作用机制；我们需要实现的目标是，能够预测混合物组成如何决定液膜结构。中子散射（neutron scattering）可帮助我们解答这些问题。