Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data
Article
2.5. Analytical Methods. The water content of EMIMOAc
was determined using a Karl Fischer titrator with model 795
KFT Titrino and 703 Ti stand from Metrohm. An Agilent 1200
high-performance liquid chromatograph equipped with a
column of phenomenex rezex ROH-organic acid H+ (300 ×
7.8 mm) was used to determine the concentrations in the liquid
samples of EMIMOAc and acetic acid.
acetic acid reached a nearly constant level of about 20 %, which
could not be reduced by prolonging the evaporation time. At
the same conditions acetic acid could be separated from a
mixture with EMIMCl to a mass content of about 8 %. It can be
concluded that, in contrast to common organic solvents or
water, acetic acid cannot easily be removed from ILs by
evaporation.
We believe that the possible reason is that acetic acid in these
ILs is dissociated to the anion H+ and the cation CH3COO−.
So in ILs the acetic acid with the form of anion and cation is
difficult to be evaporated by distillation.
Higher evaporation temperatures were not adopted because
further experiments showed that thermal decomposition of IL
becomes increasingly relevant at higher temperatures.
3.2. Separation of Acetic Acid from Mixtures with
EMIMOAc by Means of Extraction. As we have shown
above, it was difficult to reduce the mass fraction of acetic acid
in EMIMOAc to a level below 20 % by evaporation. Therefore,
we investigated liquid−liquid extraction as an alternative way to
purify acetic acid from ILs.
The most important point was to find a suitable solvent that
is not miscible with EMIMOAc in a large range of
concentration and has a miscibility gap with acetic acid. For
this purpose mixing experiments with some common solvents
and EMIMOAc were done; for the results compare Table 1.
Several physicochemical parameters are known to describe
the miscibility behavior of solvents at least to some extent. One
of them, the ET(30) value, empirically defines a solvent polarity
scale by using the solvatochromic visible absorption of betaine
dye no. 30 (2,6-diphenyl-4-(2,4,6-triphenylpyridinium-1-yl)-
phenolate) as a solvent-dependent reference process.23,24
These ET(30) values are simply defined as the molar transition
energy of the standard betaine dye no. 30, measured in solvents
of different polarity at room temperature (25 °C) and normal
pressure (1 bar). High ET(30) values correspond to a high
solvent polarity. According to Doherty et al.,25 the ET(30) value
of EMIMOAc is 211 kJ·mol−1.
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
3.1. Separation of Solvents from Mixtures with
EMIMOAc by Evaporation. It is widely believed that ILs
can easily be recycled, because they have no measurable vapor
pressure. Hence, volatile components are supposed to be easily
evaporated from mixtures with ILs. In our experiments with
acetic acid in EMIMOAc, we partly observed different results.
A comparative pretest with a mixture of an initial mass
fraction of water of 10 % in EMIMOAc showed that the
evaporation of water at 130 °C was within 3 h more efficient at
atmospheric pressure with nitrogen purging (final water
content of 0.2 wt %) than at a vacuum of 10 mbar (final
water content of 3.1 wt %). Therefore, the subsequent
evaporation tests with the aim to compare the evaporation
behavior of different solvents in mixtures with EMIMOAc were
made at atmospheric pressure under vigorous mechanical
stirring and nitrogen purging.
First, we investigated the separation of different organic
solvents from EMIMOAc by evaporation at the conditions
described above. As Figure 2 shows, ethyl acetate, n-propyl
From Table 1 we have come to the conclusion that the
change of miscibility behavior of EMIMOAc with different
solvents from miscible to not miscible correlates very well with
the dielectric constant and the ET(30) value of the solvents.
According to the experimental results the change of miscibility
takes place around a dielectric constant of 8 and an ET(30)
value of 160 kJ·mol−1.
The ET(30) value of acetic acid of 214.2 kJ·mol−1 is close to
that of EMIMOAc, which indicates a serious separation
challenge by extraction. The dielectric constant of acetic acid
is 6.15, and we also can find some solvents from Table 2 that
have a ET(30) value less than 160 kJ·mol−1 and a dielectric
constant near 6.15.
Table 2 shows some physicochemical data of solvents for
liquid−liquid extraction collected from literature26−28 and
various company publications.
Figure 2. Weight fraction of solvents in evaporation experiments with
partly different initial mass fractions (calculated from weight data of
the mixture with the assumption that the mass of the IL is constant in
the test).
Based on the principle of the dissolution in the similar
material structure and on the data of acetic acid for liquid−
liquid extraction, displayed above, solvents were chosen to test
the extraction efficiency of acetic acid from a mixture with
EMIMOAc, and the results are displayed in Table 3.
The results confirm the principle of the dissolution in the
similar material structure. The more the dielectric constant of
the solvent approaches the dielectric constant of acetic acid and
the closer the ET(30) value approaches 160 kJ·mol−1, the better
the solvent extracts acetic acid from EMIMOAc in the most
acetate, isopropyl acetate, and THF can easily and quickly be
removed from EMIMOAc. The mass fractions of these organic
solvents are reduced from 40 wt % to 5 wt % within less than 1
h.
Afterward, mixtures of different concentrations of acetic acid
in EMIMOAc were evaporated at the same conditions, and the
results are presented in Figure 2. In the tests with a high initial
concentration of acetic acid (≥ 50 % by weight) in the mixture,
the concentration of acetic acid decreased rapidly in the first
two hours to a level around 30 %. After 4 h the concentration of
C
dx.doi.org/10.1021/je300330t | J. Chem. Eng. Data XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX