Understanding the microscopic behaviour of mixtures of ionic liquids

In recent times, it has been shown that certain binary mixture of pure ionic liquids having appropriate chemical composition can behave like a new chemical entity. However, current knowledge about the microscopic behaviour of these interesting systems is rather limited. The present study is undertaken with an objective to understand the microscopic behaviour in terms of intermolecular interaction, structure and dynamics of these systems. The investigations are carried out with pure ILs as well as their mixtures so that the difference in behaviour between pure IL and (IL+IL) are understood. In the present study several (IL+IL) mixtures are constituted by mixing two pure ILs in definite mole fractions. The behaviour of these combining ILs has been investigated by studying the thermophysical properties, effect of photochromism, steady state as well as time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy, electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). These studies have suggested that the properties of (IL+IL) mixtures are quasi ideal in nature which is determined by their ultimate ionic compositions rather than by the properties of pure lLs that they are composed of. The investigations that are carried out further this work will be presented