Melting points of ionic liquids: Review and evaluation

The melting points of ionic liquids (ILs) reported since 2020 were surveyed, collected, and reviewed, which were further combined with the previous data to provide a database with 3129 ILs ranging from 177.15 to 645.9 K in melting points. In addition, the factors that affect the melting point of ILs from macro, micro, and thermodynamic perspectives were summarized and analyzed. Then the development of the quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR), group contribution method (GCM), and conductor-like screening model for realistic solvents (COSMO-RS) for predicting the melting points of ILs were reviewed and further analyzed. Combined with the evaluation together with the preliminary study conducted in this work, it shows that COSMO-RS is more promising and possible to further improve its performance, and a framework was thus proposed. (c) 2024 Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).