IONIC LIQUIDS: RECENT JOURNEY THROUGH CHROMATOGRAPHIC SEPARATION

Abstract

Ionic liquids (ILs), despite some of their crucial disadvantages, have been established to be the apt and relevant replacement of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the industrial and academic sectors as solvents. Recent investigations on thriving multifaceted applications of ionic liquids have unleashed that they are really among beneficial “environmentally-benign” solvents as far as their impact on the ecosystem is concerned. This caused them to be an exciting and lucrative domain to explore in a wider fashion and many of the leading research groups are involved in the manifestation of their inherent undisclosed legacy. While exploring the efficacy of ILs, it was found that ILs or IL-based mixed solvent systems were very good alternative of conventional solvents and could act as mobile/stationary phases or additives in gas chromatography (GC), multidimensional gas chromatography (MDGC), inverse gas chromatography (IGC), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and capillary electrophoresis (CE) very efficiently. Their (IL’s) efficacy in improvising and synchronizing the mode and nature of the chromatographic separation is well-established, undoubtedly commendable and unique in many ways. In this review we have put our concentration on the recent, beneficial and some less-explored aspects of the implementation of ILs in the above said chromatographic separation domain.