I am a computational chemist, and I'm not sure about how experimental chemists characterize anions' electronic properties. For example, if the anions act as legends or components of ionic liquids, what properties of the anions do you care about? If you have to put a bunch of anions in some order, what will be the criteria? Is it the strength of being a nucleophile, or a base? Or, is it the oxidation potential? Or anything else?
There are a lot of properties that could be essential for different reasons. It could be basity, nucleophilicity, oxidation potential, stability to hydrolysis, charge, size, mobility. The order or the criteria depend on problem you need to solve.
As Aleksei stated there are many possible scales and it really does depend upon what your research question is, I would suggest a good starting point may well be the Kamlet-Taft solvent descriptors (particularly beta by the sound of your question) , this is typically determined by measuring the lambda max of a specific solvatochromic dyes. In principle easy experiments as long as you are careful with sample preparation, particularly wrt solubility. Lots of excellent resources and papers, try looking up Tom Weltons work.
Agree with Prof. Licence and Aleksei. For a given ionic liquid hydrogen bond donor basicity of anion remain constant. Different anions can be arranged in order of their basicity.
Many thanks to Prof. Vorobev, Prof. Licence, and Prof. Shukla who really solved my problem. I personally prefer to try the hydrogen bond donor basicity or the lamda max solution, for they seems to be more commonly used in ionic liquid studies.
PS I have tried Lewis basicity, it works moderately for my problem, but my boss thinks it's too theoretical, and far from experiment :P
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Chemistry