In a current PhD project at DTU Chemical Engineering, the PhD student Yanrong Liu has measured the solubility of cellulose in seven different ionic liquids. She also used COSMO-RS for predicting the solubility of cellulose in 357 different ionic liquids consisting of 17 cations and 21 anions.
The study showed that COSMO-RS is a viable thermodynamic tool for predicting the solubility of cellulose in ionic liquids. The quantitative predictions by COSMO-RS were in line with the experimentally measured solubilities. It was also found that the strength of hydrogen bonds between cellulose and ionic liquids is a key factor for dissolving cellulose.
Yanrong Liu is supervised by Anne Meyer from BioEng, DTU Chemical Engineering and Suojiang Zhang from Institute of Process Engineering (IPE), Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is co-supervised by Kaj Thomsen, CERE, DTU Chemical Engineering and Yi Nie from IPE, CAS.
The work was published as a cover paper in Green Chemistry volume 18, number 23, pages 6147-6398.