Advantages of ion-based mole fractions for describing phase equilibria in ionic liquids: application to gas solubility.

Despite the obvious ionic character of ionic liquids (ILs), previous studies of phase equilibria in these media were formulated implicitly assuming a "molecular" behavior of the ionic solvent. In this work, a more appropriate thermodynamic treatment is applied to describe the solubility of gases in ILs. According to our results, if the concentration is expressed on an ionic basis, solutions of simple gases in ILs display rather small deviations from ideal behavior in wide composition ranges, whereas deviations are larger when the solvent is considered as an anion-cation pair. The present thermodynamic formulation also accounts for the observed solid-liquid phase equilibria of molecular and IL binary mixtures.