Tetraalkylammonium and Dialkylimidazolium Molten Salts

Molecular sieves are stable, crystalline materials with nanometer-sized pores and which have found many applications in water softening, wastewater treatment, odor control, cracking catalysts in the oil industry and many other fields. They can have a wide range of chemical compositions like silicate, aluminophosphate and all-carbon molecular sieves, to name a few. They can be synthesized using traditional hydrothermal methods or the recent ionothermal methods. In hydrothermal methods, a typical zeolite synthesis consists of a mixture of water, a source of framework atoms, a mineralizing agent and a structure-directing agent (SDA). For the ion thermal methods, an ionic liquid serves as the solvent and/or the structure-directing agent (Sun et al., 1).