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Kondrat S, Feng G, Bresme F, Urbakh M, Kornyshev AA. Theory and Simulations of Ionic Liquids in Nanoconfinement. Chem Rev 2023; 123:6668-6715. [PMID: 37163447 DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.2c00728] [Citation(s) in RCA: 23] [Impact Index Per Article: 23.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/12/2023]
Abstract
Room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) have exciting properties such as nonvolatility, large electrochemical windows, and remarkable variety, drawing much interest in energy storage, gating, electrocatalysis, tunable lubrication, and other applications. Confined RTILs appear in various situations, for instance, in pores of nanostructured electrodes of supercapacitors and batteries, as such electrodes increase the contact area with RTILs and enhance the total capacitance and stored energy, between crossed cylinders in surface force balance experiments, between a tip and a sample in atomic force microscopy, and between sliding surfaces in tribology experiments, where RTILs act as lubricants. The properties and functioning of RTILs in confinement, especially nanoconfinement, result in fascinating structural and dynamic phenomena, including layering, overscreening and crowding, nanoscale capillary freezing, quantized and electrotunable friction, and superionic state. This review offers a comprehensive analysis of the fundamental physical phenomena controlling the properties of such systems and the current state-of-the-art theoretical and simulation approaches developed for their description. We discuss these approaches sequentially by increasing atomistic complexity, paying particular attention to new physical phenomena emerging in nanoscale confinement. This review covers theoretical models, most of which are based on mapping the problems on pertinent statistical mechanics models with exact analytical solutions, allowing systematic analysis and new physical insights to develop more easily. We also describe a classical density functional theory, which offers a reliable and computationally inexpensive tool to account for some microscopic details and correlations that simplified models often fail to consider. Molecular simulations play a vital role in studying confined ionic liquids, enabling deep microscopic insights otherwise unavailable to researchers. We describe the basics of various simulation approaches and discuss their challenges and applicability to specific problems, focusing on RTIL structure in cylindrical and slit confinement and how it relates to friction and capacitive and dynamic properties of confined ions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Svyatoslav Kondrat
- Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, 01-224 Warsaw, Poland
- Institute for Computational Physics, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart 70569, Germany
| | - Guang Feng
- State Key Laboratory of Coal Combustion, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan 430074, China
- Nano Interface Centre for Energy, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
| | - Fernando Bresme
- Department of Chemistry, Molecular Sciences Research Hub, White City Campus, London W12 0BZ,United Kingdom
- Thomas Young Centre for Theory and Simulation of Materials, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
- London Centre for Nanotechnology, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
| | - Michael Urbakh
- School of Chemistry and the Sackler Center for Computational Molecular and Materials Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel
| | - Alexei A Kornyshev
- Department of Chemistry, Molecular Sciences Research Hub, White City Campus, London W12 0BZ,United Kingdom
- Thomas Young Centre for Theory and Simulation of Materials, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
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Verkholyak T, Kuzmak A, Kondrat S. Capacitive energy storage in single-file pores: Exactly solvable models and simulations. J Chem Phys 2021; 155:174112. [PMID: 34742202 DOI: 10.1063/5.0066786] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/14/2022] Open
Abstract
Understanding charge storage in low-dimensional electrodes is crucial for developing novel ecologically friendly devices for capacitive energy storage and conversion and water desalination. Exactly solvable models allow in-depth analyses and essential physical insights into the charging mechanisms. So far, however, such analytical approaches have been mainly limited to lattice models. Herein, we develop a versatile, exactly solvable, one-dimensional off-lattice model for charging single-file pores. Unlike the lattice model, this model shows an excellent quantitative agreement with three-dimensional Monte Carlo simulations. With analytical calculations and simulations, we show that the differential capacitance can be bell-shaped (one peak), camel-shaped (two peaks), or have four peaks. Transformations between these capacitance shapes can be induced by changing pore ionophilicity, by changing cation-anion size asymmetry, or by adding solvent. We find that the camel-shaped capacitance, characteristic of dilute electrolytes, appears for strongly ionophilic pores with high ion densities, which we relate to charging mechanisms specific to narrow pores. We also derive a large-voltage asymptotic expression for the capacitance, showing that the capacitance decays to zero as the inverse square of the voltage, C ∼ u-2. This dependence follows from hard-core interactions and is not captured by the lattice model.
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Affiliation(s)
- Taras Verkholyak
- Institute for Condensed Matter Physics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Svientsitskii Street 1, 79011 Lviv, Ukraine
| | - Andrij Kuzmak
- Department for Theoretical Physics, I. Franko National University of Lviv, Lviv, Ukraine
| | - Svyatoslav Kondrat
- Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, 01-224 Warsaw, Poland
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Cruz C, Ciach A. Phase Transitions and Electrochemical Properties of Ionic Liquids and Ionic Liquid-Solvent Mixtures. Molecules 2021; 26:3668. [PMID: 34208542 PMCID: PMC8234089 DOI: 10.3390/molecules26123668] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/15/2021] [Revised: 06/04/2021] [Accepted: 06/10/2021] [Indexed: 12/20/2022] Open
Abstract
Recent advances in studies of ionic liquids (IL) and ionic liquid-solvent mixtures are reviewed. Selected experimental, simulation, and theoretical results for electrochemical, thermodynamical, and structural properties of IL and IL-solvent mixtures are described. Special attention is paid to phenomena that are not predicted by the classical theories of the electrical double layer or disagree strongly with these theories. We focus on structural properties, especially on distribution of ions near electrodes, on electrical double layer capacitance, on effects of confinement, including decay length of a dissjoining pressure between confinig plates, and on demixing phase transition. In particular, effects of the demixing phase transition on electrochemical properties of ionic liquid-solvent mixtures for different degrees of confinement are presented.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Alina Ciach
- Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, 44/52, 01-224 Warsaw, Poland;
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