Computational investigation of ionic liquids

Abstract

Ionic liquids have been extensively studied over the past few decades to take advantage of their fine-tunable physicochemical properties. Due to the high cost of synthesis as well as a large number of ion combinations, it is beneficial to investigate them using computational chemistry methods. At the same time, it is also challenging to find a suitable computational approach that captures the whole variety of different types of interactions present in ionic liquids. In this work, we have compared the performance of PBE, M06-L, SCAN, SCAN0, and B2PLYP density functionals when describing ionic liquids. DLPNO-CCSD(T) method extrapolated to the complete basis set limit is used as a reference. In addition,we have constructed a density functional theory-based model to evaluate the electrochemical stability and viscosity of ionic liquids. This simple yet efficient model correlates the macroscopic properties to our computational results.