Ionic Liquids: Radiation Chemistry, Solvation Dynamics and Reactivity Patterns

Ionic liquids (ILs) are a rapidly expanding family of condensed-phase media with important applications in energy production, nuclear fuel and waste processing, improving the efficiency and safety of industrial chemical processes, and pollution prevention. ILs generally have low volatilities and are combustion-resistant, highly conductive, recyclable and capable of dissolving a wide variety of materials. They are finding new uses in chemical synthesis, catalysis, separations chemistry, electrochemistry and other areas. Ionic liquids have dramatically different properties compared to conventional molecular solvents, and they provide a new and unusual environment to test our theoretical understanding of primary radiation chemistry, charge transfer and other reactions. We are interested in how IL properties influence physical and dynamical processes that determine the stability and lifetimes of reactive intermediates and thereby affect the courses of reactions and product distributions. We study these issues by characterization of primary radiolysis products and measurements of their yields and reactivity, quantification of electron solvation dynamics and scavenging of electrons in different states of solvation. From this knowledge we wish to learn how to predict radiolytic mechanisms and control them or mitigate their effects on the properties of materials used in nuclear fuel processing, for example, and to apply IL radiation chemistry to answer questions about general chemical reactivity in ionic liquids that will aid in the development of applications listed above. Very early in our radiolysis studies it became evident that the slow solvation dynamics of the excess electron in ILs (which vary over a wide viscosity range) increase the importance of pre-solvated electron reactivity and consequently alter product distributions and subsequent chemistry. This difference from conventional solvents has profound effects on predicting and controlling radiolytic yields, which need to be quantified for the successful use under radiolytic conditions. Electron solvation dynamics in ILs are measured directly when possible and estimated using proxies (e.g. coumarin-153 dynamic emission Stokes shifts or benzophenone anion solvation) in other cases. Electron reactivity is measured using ultrafast kinetics techniques for comparison with the solvation process.