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Room-temperature ionic liquids are salts that are liquid at room temperature. Their use as catalysts and catalytic support has been studied extensively. However, there are very few measurements on their solubility and phase equilibria in common organic solvents. In this work, the liquid-liquid phase equilibria of mixtures of room-temperature ionic liquids, 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate, [R n mim][PF 6 ] (1) where R n ) butyl, pentyl, hexyl, heptyl, and octyl, with butan-1-ol (2) over a composition range have been measured. The binodal coexistence curves of the mixtures were found to have an upper critical solution temperature (USCT) at x 2 ≈ 0.9. The UCST decreases with increase in the length of the alkyl chain of the ionic liquid, with the UCST of the butyl at 373 K and that of the octyl at 326 K. Both the UCST and the composition at the UCST as a function of the 1-alkyl group chain length can be reasonably well predicted from theory on the basis of unimolecular quantum chemical calculations.

The size of droplets in emulsions is important in many industrial, biological, and environmental systems, as it determines the stability, rheology, and area available in the emulsion for physical or chemical processes that occur at the interface. While the balance of fluid inertia and surface tension in determining droplet size under turbulent mixing in the inertial subrange has been well established, the classical scaling prediction by Shinnar half a century ago of the dependence of droplet size on the viscosity of the continuous phase in the viscous subrange has not been clearly validated in experiment. By employing extremely stable suspensions of highly viscous oils as the continuous phase and using a particle video microscope (PVM) probe and a focused beam reflectance method (FBRM) probe, we report measurements spanning 2 orders of magnitude in the continuous phase viscosity for the size of droplets in water-in-oil emulsions. The wide range in measurements allowed identification of a scaling regime of droplet size proportional to the inverse square root of the viscosity, consistent with the viscous subrange theory of Shinnar. A single curve for droplet size based on the Reynolds and Weber numbers is shown to accurately predict droplet size for a range of shear rates, mixing geometries, interfacial tensions, and viscosities. Viscous subrange control of droplet size is shown to be important for high viscous shear stresses, i.e., very high shear rates, as is desirable or found in many industrial or natural processes, or very high viscosities, as is the case in the present study.

Water droplet sizes in crude oil emulsions were measured using an in situ particle video microscope (PVM) probe and a focused beam reflectance measurement (FBRM) probe for a variety of oils spanning over two orders of magnitude in viscosity and for varying shear rates. The arithmetic or Sauter mean diameter was found to maintain the same constants of proportionality with the maximum (99th percentile) droplet size for different distributions, previously only shown for water-continuous emulsions. The FBRM values for the mean droplet size, while lower than the PVM values, could be related to the latter by an empirical quadratic relationship with an average error of less than 20%. The droplet size distribution was found to be represented well by a log-normal distribution with good agreement between correlated and measured mean droplet size. Following the agreement between the mean and maximum droplet sizes, the log-normal standard deviation was linearly related to the mean droplet size. The PVM probe was found to be a useful tool for determining droplet sizes in water-in-oil emulsions and as a calibration method for the FBRM probe. The droplet sizes measured provide a useful set of data for comparison with predictive models to determine the mean size or full droplet size distributions.