Developing effective and green methods for food analysis and separation has become an urgent issue regarding the ever-increasing concern of food quality and safety. Ionic liquids (ILs) are a new chemical medium and soft functional material developed under the framework of green chemistry and possess many unique properties, such as low melting points, low-to-negligible vapor pressures, excellent solubility, structural designability and high thermal stability. Combining ILs with extraction techniques not only takes advantage of ILs but also overcomes the disadvantages of traditional extraction methods. This subject has attracted intensive research efforts recently. Here, we present a brief review of the current research status and latest developments regarding the application of IL-assisted microextraction, including dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction (DLLME) and solid-phase microextraction (SPME), in food analysis and separation. The practical applications of ILs in determining toxic and harmful substances in food specimens with quite different natures are summarized and discussed. The critical function of ILs and the advantages of IL-based microextraction techniques over conventional extraction techniques are discussed in detail. Additionally, the recovery of ILs using different approaches is also presented to comply with green analytical chemistry requirements.

The unbalanced evaporation of solvents in lowtemperature sintered inks for printed electronics leads to a series of problems in the actual printing process, including printed pattern distortion, surface cracking, and the coffee ring effect, which has become a serious obstacle to this technique. Here, we present a comprehensive investigation of the influence of the solvent composition, environmental, and sintering conditions on the complicated pattern formation process of reactive silver inks. The results first showed that only inks with a certain wettability of solvents could form well-defined patterns. Then, the solvent composition and ambient humidity can be adjusted to balance the nonequilibrium evaporative flow within the liquid and thus to obtain a flat liquid film. Combined with the rapid UV sintering process, the particle size, porosity, and roughness could be controlled to produce dense and homogeneous silver films. Finally, we successfully printed silver electrodes with a smooth and dense surface (R qs ∼ 21 nm in 0.8 × 0.8 mm 2 area and less than 1% porosity) under an optimized relative humidity (RH) of 50−60% at room temperature with the solvent composition of IPA (isopropanol)/2,3-BD (2,3-butanediol) = 8:2. In addition, we also demonstrated high-performance Pr−IZO (praseodymium-doped indium−zinc oxide) thin film transistors (TFTs) with a mobility (μ sat ) of 2.14 cm 2 /V/s and I on /I off ratio of over 10 7 using source−drain electrodes printed under optimized conditions.

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