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.

负载型离子液体相（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——是一种经实践验证的催化应用策略，但目前针对该场景优化离子液体的相关研究仍相对不足。尽管制备新型离子液体并表征其性能的操作简便易行，但该方式不仅浪费资源且效率低下；更优的方案是通过制备混合体系来调控离子液体的性能，例如10种纯组分即可组合出数百种混合体系。本研究旨在阐明并进而预测混合体系的性能随组分比例的变化规律，我们关注的是分别含烃链与含氟碳链的两类离子液体所形成的混合体系。此类混合体系会引发液膜的结构化现象，进而影响催化过程的运行效果，因此我们需要实现对混合组分比例如何决定液膜结构的精准预测。中子散射（Neutron Scattering）技术可用于解答上述研究问题。