Hi Niroodha Pitawela ,

It's been a while since I've used ionic liquids, but when I was using them I tried using Ag/AgCl wire quasi reference electrodes in my measurements. Unfortunately because I was interested in low concentrations of redox molecules, and eventually measuring single molecule electrochemistry I had a lot of trouble with the Ag/AgCl wire QRE contaminating the solution. Though this issue really may have been exaggerated by the fact that these sorts of single molecule measurements are easily contaminated.

Eventually I ended up using polypyrrole (PPY) coated wire QREs. This was because the PPY coating can be made using counter ions which are also present in your ionic liquid, so it reduces the likelihood of contamination.

It's worth mentioning that I had also considered Pt wire QREs, which are a decent choice for simple electrochemistry investigations. Unfortunately I had to rule these out because I was running scanning probe measurements, which required stability over days rather than a few hours.

I hope this helps!

Sam

Samantha Catarelli Thank you very much for your valuable advice! I am going to fill the non-aqueous reference electrode compartment (which has Ag wire in it) with the same electrolyte solution as in the electrochemical cell. It would be tedious to modify the pore size of the frit to block ionic liquid and silver ions. However I think the diffusion of silver ions through the frit would be much slower in the presence of ionic liquid.

Thank you once again!