Materials modified with ionic liquids for solid phase extraction
The application of ionic liquids (ILs) in the analytical chemistry context has been increased in the last years due to their exceptional chemical and physical properties. The term IL is used to define a broad class of semi-organic salts composed entirely by ions which are liquids in the range of 180-600K. Among all these potential substances, room-temperature ILs (defined as the ILs which present a melting point lower than 100 ÂșC) are specially interesting due to their easy manipulation at normal experimental conditions. Among the main properties of these special solvents, their negligible vapor pressure, their good thermal stability and good extractability towards a variety of analytes should be highlighted. Since ILs can be obtained as a combination of different cations and anions, the researcher can select the more appropriate IL to solve a given analytical problem. This tunable nature makes them "task-specific" solvents. ILs have been used as solvents in (micro)extr...