NMR on Ionic Liquids

Liquid state NMR is a powerful characterization technique to study chemical structures, intramolecular local motions, translational and rotational dynamic of the whole molecule, solvation and intermolecular interactions [Bagno et al., 2005]. In this chapter we present a summary of the recent work published in the last eight years (2008-2015) on NMR investigation of ionic liquid (IL) systems, with particular emphasis on the structure and dynamics of this class of compounds. Some review papers that also cover the topics included here exist, and should be consulted to get a wider overview of the research field [Rollet and Bessada, 2013; Weingärtner, 2013; Bankmann and Giernoth, 2007]. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 gives general remarks on the ionic liquid chemical structure. Section 3 concerns the NMR techniques applied for structure determination. Section 4 deals with molecular dynamics focusing in particular on translational motion (section 4.1) of pure IL as well as solutes dissolved in IL media. Rotational motions are discussed separately in section 4.2.