Hydrated Silicate Ionic Liquids: Ionic Liquids for Silicate Material Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces Hydrated Silicate Ionic Liquids (HSILs), room temperature melts of alkali silicates, as innovative tools for synthesizing porous silicates, studying crystallization, and modeling zeolite formation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of HSILs' properties, their role in zeolite synthesis, and offers physicochemical data to support computational and experimental studies.

Findings

HSILs enable new pathways for porous silicate synthesis.

Reduced complexity of HSILs facilitates in situ crystallization studies.

Physicochemical data support modeling of zeolite formation.

Abstract

The development of Hydrated Silicate Ionic Liquids, which are hypo-hydrated room temperature melts of alkali silicates, has created new opportunities for synthesizing porous silicates. Their discovery also allows to reinterpret the role of an ionic liquid for zeolite synthesis and offer unique opportunities to study crystallization in situ. The reduced complexity of HSILs renders them excellent model systems yielding a large space of zeolite phases and framework compositions, and even allowing computer simulations. This work summarizes the impact of alkalinity, hydration, and cation type on silicate speciation and provides physicochemical data spanning relevant temperatures and compositions for zeolite formation. The data is meant as a reference point to further accommodate and verify (computational) models.