Ionic liquid mixture design for carbon capture using property clustering technique

Abstract

Ionic liquids (ILs) have recently been introduced as green solvents and potential substitute to volatile organic compounds. This is due to their negligible vapour pressure, high thermal stability, and large liquid phase range. Moreover, their physical and chemical properties can be tuned accordingly by proper choice of cations and anions. Thus, researchers suggest replacing conventional amine based carbon dioxide (CO2) capturing solvents with IL solvents. However, study shows that ILs with high absorption rate and capacity generally have relatively higher viscosity and cost, which make pure IL solvent impractical. Instead, a mixture of ILs is desired to improve the overall performance as a CO2 solvent. Given there are up to 1012 possible binary mixtures, it is time consuming and expensive to identify suitable binary IL mixture as CO2 capturing solvent by experimental approach. The main focus of this work is to develop a systematic property based visual approach to synthesis IL binary mixtures, specifically for carbon capture purpose. An illustrative case study is solved to demonstrate the proposed approach.