DESs: New ionic fluids

Sussex Drug Discovery Centre

You will surely have heard of ILs or ionic liquids, which were discovered more than a century ago, but have you hear of the new variety of ionic fluids called Deep Eutectic Solvents or DES?
I had certainly not come across DES until this recent joint publication by Spanish and Scottish research groups. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie. 201400889/abstract)
A Deep Eutectic Solvent is a type of ionic solvent with special properties. It is composed of two or three cheap and safe components that together form an eutectic mixture, with a melting point much lower than either of the individual components. They were first described in 2003 when Abbot and co-workers reported on a low melting mixture of a 1:2 mole ratio of choline chloride (2-hydroxyethyl-trimethylammonium chloride [ChCl]) and urea. Since then many different mixtures have been described. In most cases a DES is obtained by mixing a quaternary ammonium salt with…

View original post 435 more words

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s