Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-4-2019
Abstract
We report experiments on the extraction of acids and bases from an aqueous phase to a pseudoprotic ionic liquid phase consisting of an equimolar mixture of trihexylamine and octanoic acid. We observed the extraction of a wide range of acids and bases, and investigated the mechanism of extraction in detail. Our results confirmed the observation of the Hofmeister effect in these systems reported in our previous work, where the extent of the extraction of copper salts was significantly influenced by the interactions between extracted inorganic anions and the organic phase. Our results further demonstrated that the organic layer served as a “floating buffer” capable of stabilizing the pH of an acidic or alkaline aqueous phase. The results tie current interest in protic and pseudoprotic ionic liquids to earlier work on the extraction of acids using amine and acid–base couples as extraction agents in an inert organic solvent.
Comments
This article was originally published in Molecules, available at DOI: 10.3390/molecules24050894.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license.