Ionic liquid-forming salts often display low melting points (a lack of crystallisation at ambient temperature and pressure) as a result of decreased lattice energies in the crystalline state. Intermolecular interactions between the anion and cation, and the conformational states of each component of the salt, are of significant interest as many of the distinctive properties ascribed to ionic liquids are determined to a large extent by these interactions. Crystallographic analysis provides a direct insight into the spatial relationship between the cations and anions and provides a basis for an enhanced understanding of the physico-chemical relationship of the ionic liquids. This perspective article examines the crystallographic studies of relevance to ionic liquid-forming organic salts as a basis for the rational design and synthesis of novel ionic liquids.

1,3-Disubstituted imidazolium ionic liquids have been the subject of numerous theoretical and experimental studies due to their low viscosity-often the very lowest for any given cation/anion family. One of the mysteries in the imidazolium family of salts is the sharp increase in viscosity that is observed on methylating at the C2 position in the ring. In the nonmethylated case, the C2 proton is observed to be distinctly acidic and, where this is undesirable, substitution of the C2 position removes the problem, but produces an unexpected increase in viscosity. Methylation at other positions on the ring does not produce such a significant effect. In this study, two possible structural or energetic sources of the increased viscosity were investigated: (1) ion association, as probed by the Walden rule, and (2) differences in the potential energy surface profiles that favor ionic transport in the non C2-methylated imidazolium ionic liquids. The second hypothesis was investigated using high-level ab initio theory. The higher viscosity of C2-methylated imidazolium ionic liquids is shown to be a result of high potential energy barriers (significantly above the available thermal energy) between the energetically preferred conformations on the potential energy surface, thus restricting movement of ions in the liquid state to only small oscillations and inhibiting the overall ion transport.

A series of new protic compounds based on active pharmaceutical ingredients have been synthesised and characterised. Some of the salts synthesised produced ionic liquids, while others that were associated with rigid molecular structures tended to produce high melting points. The "protonic" behaviour of these compounds was found to be a major determinant of their properties. Indicator studies, FTIR-ATR and transport properties (Walden plot) were used to probe the extent of proton transfer and ion association in these ionic liquids. While proton transfer was shown to have taken place in all cases, the Walden plot indicated strong ion association in the primary amine based examples due to hydrogen bonding. This was further explored via crystal structures of related compounds, which showed that extended hydrogen bonded clusters tend to form in these salts. These clusters may dictate membrane transport properties of these compounds in vivo.

A series of salts, some of which are ionic liquids, are prepared from cations and anions drawn from Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) materials. Using the solid-state structures of the crystalline salts as a basis, an anti-crystal engineering approach to the preparation of “Active Ionic Liquids” (AILs) is explored.

The Madelung constant is a key feature determining the lattice energy of a crystal structure and hence its stability. However, the complexity of the calculation has meant that it has previously not been readily available for complex structures, for example for organic salts. We propose a new robust method for calculating Madelung constants of such structures based on a generalized numerical direct summation approach. The method is applied to various organic salts from the ionic liquid and pharmaceutical fields. The values calculated are seen to be a unique feature of the crystal structure, reflecting the positioning of the ions in the unit cell and being sensitive to ion pairing. The difference in Madelung constants between different polymorphs of a compound is also shown.