Inedible saccharides: a platform for CO2 capturing

The economic viability of eco-friendly and renewable materials promotes the development of an alternative technology for climate change mitigation. Investigations reported over the past few years have allowed understanding the mechanism of action for a wide spectrum of saccharides toward carbon dioxide (CO2), in terms of reactivity, reversibility, stability and uptake. Exploiting bio-renewables, viz., inedible saccharides, to reduce the anthropogenic carbon footprint upon providing a sustainable and promising technology that is of interest to different groups of scientists, to overcome demerits associated with the current state-of-the-art aqueous amine scrubbing agents, following a "green chemistry guideline", by employing materials with properties relevant to the environment toward sustainable development. The interdisciplinary nature of research in this area provides a large body of literature that would meet the interest of the broad readership of different multidisciplinary fields. Although many reports emphasize the use of biomass in various industrial products ranging from pharmaceutics, medical preparations, soaps, textiles, cosmetics, household cleaners, and so on, to our knowledge there is no focused article that addresses the application of saccharides for CO2 sequestration. In this review, we highlight the recent advances on the use of oligo-, poly- and cyclic saccharides to achieve a reversible binding of CO2. The future research directions are discussed to provide insight toward achieving sustainable development through implementing bio-renewables.

Enhanced self-assembly for the solubilization of cholesterol in molecular solvent/ionic liquid mixtures

The development of new solvents combining greatly enhanced solubility for sparingly soluble compounds and good kinetic properties is challenging. In this study, we constructed a family of new molecular solvent/ionic liquid (IL) mixtures with amphiphilic, anionic functional long-chain carboxylate ionic liquids (LCC-ILs) as a key component for the solubilization of sparingly soluble compounds, using cholesterol as a model solute. Polarized optical microscopy (POM), wide angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD), Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectra and ¹H NMR showed that ordered mesoscopic structures, such as liquid crystals (LCs), were formed when cholesterol was dissolved in the mixtures, presenting a self-assembly induced dissolution mechanism driven by H-bond interaction and van der Waals forces in the mixtures. A synergistic effect between the molecular solvents and LCC-ILs was revealed, which contributed to enhanced solute-solvent self-assembly in dissolution over pure LCC-ILs and thus elevated solubility. Additionally, the effect of IL concentration, solvent type and anionic alkyl-chain length on self-assembly and solubility was investigated. These mixtures showed unparalleled solubilities for cholesterol, while maintaining a low viscosity. The quantitative solubilities (g g^-1) of cholesterol were as high as 0.70, 0.84 and 0.82, respectively, at 25 °C in ethyl acetate/[P₄₄₄₄][C₁₅H₃₁COO] (50 wt%), n-heptane/[P₄₄₄₄][C₁₅H₃₁COO] (40 wt%) and ethyl acetate/[P₄₄₄₄][C₁₇H₃₅COO] (50 wt%) mixtures, which were the highest solubilities of cholesterol ever reported, six- to 980-fold higher than traditional molecular solvents and even one- to seven-fold higher compared to pure LCC-ILs. These results demonstrated the considerable potential of molecular solvent/LCC-ILs mixtures as promising solvents for solubilization and advanced separation processes.

Atomically precise understanding of nanofluids: nanodiamonds and carbon nanotubes in ionic liquids

A nanofluid (NF) is composed of a base liquid and suspended nanoparticles (NPs). High-performance NFs exhibit significantly better heat conductivities, as compared to their base liquids. In the present work, we applied all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to characterize diffusive and ballistic energy transfer mechanisms within nanodiamonds (NDs), carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and N-butylpyridinium tetrafluoroborate ionic liquid (IL). We showed that heat transfer within both NDs and CNTs is orders of magnitude faster than that in the surrounding IL, whereas diffusion of all particles in the considered NF is similar. Intramolecular heat transfer in NPs is a key factor determining the difference of NFs from base liquids. Solvation free energy of NDs and CNTs in ILs was estimated from MD simulations. The geometric dimensions of NPs were shown to be a major source of entropic penalty. Temperature adjusts the entropic factor substantially by modifying a genuine local structure of the bulk base liquid. Our work contributes to engineering more stable and productive suspensions of NPs in ILs, which are necessary for essential progress in the field of NFs.

Viscosity of heptane-toluene mixtures. Comparison of molecular dynamics and group contribution methods

Three methods of molecular dynamics simulation [Green-Kubo (G-K), non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) and reversed non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (RNEMD)], and two group contribution methods [UNIFAC-VISCO and Grunberg-Nissan (G-N)] were used to calculate the viscosity of mixtures of n-heptane and toluene (known as heptol). The results obtained for the viscosity and density of heptol were compared with reported experimental data, and the advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed. Overall, the five methods showed good agreement between calculated and experimental viscosities. In all cases, the deviation was lower than 9%. It was found that, as the concentration of toluene increases, the deviation of the density of the mixture (as calculated with molecular dynamics methods) also increases, which directly affects the viscosity result obtained. Among the molecular simulation techniques evaluated here, G-K produced the best results, and represents the optimal balance between quality of result and time required for simulation. The NEMD method produced acceptable results for the viscosity of the system but required more simulation time as well as the determination of an appropriate shear rate. The RNEMD method was fast and eliminated the need to determine a set of values for shear rate, but introduced large fluctuations in measurements of shear rate and viscosity. The two group contribution methods were accurate and fast when used to calculate viscosity, but require knowledge of the viscosity of the pure compounds, which is a serious limitation for applications in complex multicomponent systems.