How ionic are ionic liquids?

Abstract: Ionic liquids are continuously finding more and more applications, both in research and in the industry. Many attempts have been made to find parameters that could be used to describe all ionic liquid systems. Five years ago a Japanese group applied the work of Gutmann on ionic liquids to use ionic association to describe solvation effects. The group calculated ionic association from conductivity and diffusion measurements. This report presents a direct approach through electrophoretic NMR to measure ionic association in ionic liquids.  The report contains a brief introduction to ionic liquids and their properties as well as a short explanation of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, diffusion NMR and a more detailed explanation of electrophoretic NMR (eNMR). Experimental setups, taken from previous work by the NMR group at Physical Chemistry KTH, have been modified to allow for measurements in ionic liquid systems. The report discusses the issues that can arise when measuring eNMR in ionic liquids and suggests solutions. The method developed is principally built upon experiments on 1-butyl-3-methyl-imidazolium trifluoroacetate and is directly applicable to other ionic liquid systems. For more viscous systems than the one investigated here, slight changes will need to be made, as explained in the report.  In order to evaluate the method developed during the project the degree of association for 1-butyl-3-methyl-imidazolium trifluoroacetate has been calculated from experimental results and results in similar values as reported by Tokuda et al.. Furthermore, the temperature variation due to Joule heating during a complete eNMR experiment was also investigated by observing change in chemical shift.