Ionic liquids (ILs) have become recognized as greener media for engineering issues due to their properties, such as almost null volatility, tuneability and recyclability. Nowadays, ILs are being applied at industrial level by different companies e.g. Petronas, Bash, BP, Degussa and Linde industrial gases. Fluorinated ionic liquids (FILs) are a novel ILs family with fluorous tags equal or longer than four carbon atoms, that can present 3 nanosegregated domains. Then, it is clear that FILs can be used as ?3 in 1? solvents increasing separation power. Playing with Van der Waals, columbic and hydrogen bonding interactions and the size of fluorinated domain will allow the development of solvents designed for specific separation processes.
The use of fluorinated compounds (FCs) contaminants is clearly to increase for the foreseeable future due to their economic value and industrial application. These FCs have a very serious impact on public health due to their global warming potential, toxicity and bioaccumulation, promoting the destruction of many ecosystems. This project aims to develop efficient technology based on greener FILs to reduce the environmental impact of these industrial processes. FILs will be applied as solvents to recover/recycle FCs contaminants (greenhouse FCs gases and perfluoroalkyl acids of industrial effluents that are persistent, bioaccumulative in food chains and toxic to various species). FCs gases are the most powerful and longest lasting greenhouse gases, and some of them have a global warming potential up to 23000 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. It is important also to consider that these gases emissions have increased up to 60% since 1990, in contrast to all other greenhouse gases, whose emissions have been reduced. Nowadays, the European regulation forces to cut the emissions of these gases by 2/3 by 2030 compared to levels in 2014.
With this goal in mind, this challenging project is based on the possibility to design and develop FILs with two main scientific objectives: 1) extraction processes where FILs are used as solvents to separate perfluoroalkyl acid contaminants, significantly reducing industrial effluents; 2) gas separation processes where FILs are used to reduce emissions of FCs gases which is the major goal of the Kigali Agreement.
This project is based on years of scientific research on FILs field which demonstrates the solid knowledge of their thermophysics, toxicity, aggregation and phase behavior (1-6), interaction and segregation (using simulation and modelling tools) (7-9) and their performance in separation processes (10). This experience clearly demonstrates that the risk associated with this project is minimum and that our team have the skills and competence required to pursue the goals of this project.