Solubility of small molecule in ionic liquids: a model study on the ionic size effect.

Recently, the solvent power of ionic liquid (IL) has been described based on Flory-Huggins (FH) theory assuming that the volumes of the components are the same (J. Phys. Chem. B, 2006, 110, 16205). Here, we extended the FH theory to derive the solvent power in the case of different sizes (molar volumes) of the IL's components based on "polymer-like" model. Applying this model, the effect of ionic size on the solvent power of ionic liquids has been investigated. It was found that the effect of size can be characterized by introducing the effective volume (V+ and V-) of each site of the ion, and for the equivalent ionic liquid, the larger effective volume of the ionic liquid has the larger solvent power. Our results are in excellent agreement with the experimental solubility data in various ionic liquids.