A New Volume-Based Approach for Predicting Thermophysical Behavior of Ionic Liquids and Ionic Liquid Crystals

Volume-based prediction of melting points and other properties of ionic liquids (ILs) relies on empirical relations with volumes of ions in these low-melting organic salts. Here we report an accurate way to ionic volumes by Bader’s partitioning of electron densities from X-ray diffraction obtained via a simple database approach. For a series of 1-tetradecyl-3-methylimidazolium salts, the volumes of different anions are found to correlate linearly with melting points; larger anions giving lower-melting ILs. The volume-based concept is transferred to ionic liquid crystals (ILs that adopt liquid crystalline mesophases, ILCs) for predicting the domain of their existence from the knowledge of their constituents. For 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium ILCs, linear correlations of ionic volumes with the occurrence of LC mesophase and its stability are revealed, thus paving the way to rational design of ILCs by combining suitably sized ions.