A More Sustainable and Cheaper One-Pot Route for the Synthesis of Hydrophobic Ionic Liquids for Electrolyte Applications.

An innovative one-pot synthetic process that uses water as the only processing solvent was used to obtain ionic liquids (ILs) in a yield of approximately 95 mol % and purity greater than 99.3 wt % (<2 ppm each of lithium, bromide and moisture) in a processing time of 1 h. Since no heating is needed for carrying out the reaction and no purification through sorbents is required, energy, time and chemicals can be saved to minimize waste production. The physicochemical and electrochemical validation, including tests in batteries, reported herein shows that the above-mentioned ILs have properties analogous to those of ILs prepared by standard reported procedures and show high performance without any further purification step through sorbents. These characteristics, in combination with low cost, easy execution and scale-up, sustainability and versatility, make the one-pot process even more appealing, especially for industrial-scale applications.