This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is targeted at the development of a novel, continuous method for the production of ionic liquids. Ionic liquids are a class of industrial chemicals that can replace volatile organic compounds and other chemicals in production processes with a low-vapor pressure, reusable, and more environmentally benign set of chemicals. Ionic liquids can replace organic solvents in industrial processes, can be used to make non-flammable batteries, and even capture CO2 from power plants. While the potential of ionic liquids is significant, the current cost is prohibitive.. DellaTech, LLC proposes to develop a novel, cost-effective method for producing ionic liquids in industrial volumes. The highly flexible technique enables continuous production of ionic liquids with low capital cost. It eliminates the use of solvents in the synthesis process, and produces a very high purity product.
The broader/commercial impacts of this research are to make ionic liquids cost-effective in a wide range of industries. Ionic liquids can replace volatile organic solvents in a vast range of industrial processes, are leading candidates for biomass processing, and have broad applications in electrochemistry, advanced batteries, supercapacitors and as heat transfer fluids in advanced concentrating solar plants. In addition, our innovative synthesis technique has broad application across the chemical industry. Cost-effective ionic liquids are critical elements of the new energy economy, with applications in biomass, solar power, and grid-scale energy storage. Techniques developed in this research will enable technologies that will enhance U.S. energy security.
Ionic liquids are an emerging class of materials that could form the foundation for transformational changes in the U.S. chemical, pharmaceutical, and energy industries, leading to less polluting, more sustainable processes with greatly reduced environmental impact. With highly tailorable chemical properties, negligible vapor pressure, wide electrochemical stability windows and thermal stability at temperatures of 250 °C or more, room-temperature ionic liquids offer the possibility of order-of-magnitude reductions in volatile organic compounds release, elimination of organic solvent use in a wide range of industrial processes, and the introduction of energy storage devices with 2–5 times the energy density of current batteries and ultracapacitors. Significant research progress has been made in the use of ionic liquids in chemical synthesis, biomass processing, advanced batteries and ultracapacitors, electroplating and polymer production. The field is among the most active in chemistry today, with more than 2,040 papers published in 2009 alone. Despite this progress, industrial applications have been slow to emerge, with the delay at least in large part due to the lack of availability of these unique materials in industrially-useful quantities. Much of the lack of supply is directly traceable to the cost and difficulty of scaling laboratory synthesis techniques to industrial production. Among the significant barriers to broader application of ionic liquids (ILs) is their high cost. In small quantities, ILs carry prices of $1,000/kg or more. Although ILs can be cost effective at very high production rates of 1000’s of metric tons/year, the high cost in intermediate volumes is a serious barrier to companies that seek to deploy these innovative materials in industrial processes. Much of the high cost of producing ionic liquids is tied to their small-scale, time-consuming synthesis in small batches. Most ionic liquids are still synthesized today in laboratory glassware using approaches and equipment that would be familiar to a 19th-century chemist. Boulder Ionics has developed a novel technique for cost-effective production of high-purity ionic liquids using a high-throughput, solvent-free synthetic route. In this program, Boulder Ionics demonstrated the production equipment and synthetic route to an ionic liquid with commercial applications in ultracapacitors for energy storage. This production equipment and synthetic route can also be applied to other ionic liquids and fine chemical manufacturing. The demonstration showed that our production equipment can be operated safely under conditions not possible in conventional equipment and at sufficiently high throughput to enable cost-effective manufacture of these versatile fluids. Using the novel reactor technology developed under this program, Boulder Ionics should be able to produce ultra-high purity ionic liquids at much lower prices than conventional approaches. These ionic liquids can be used in batteries, ultracapacitors, chemical and pharmaceutical production, and in certain types of solar cells. By providing a low-cost, high-quality domestic source of these versatile chemicals, the new process will open doors to widescale use of these materials in American industry.
