Department of Chemistry, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, United States.
Chemical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1 Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830, United States.
J Phys Chem B. 2021 Jun 24;125(24):6359-6372. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.1c01065. Epub 2021 May 28.
High-temperature molten salt research is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance these days due to the apparent advantage of these systems in areas related to clean and sustainable energy harvesting and transfer. In many ways, this is a mature field with decades if not already a century of outstanding work devoted to it. Yet, much of this work was done with pioneering experimental and computational setups that lack the current day capabilities of synchrotrons and high-performance-computing systems resulting in deeply entrenched results in the literature that when carefully inspected may require revision. Yet, in other cases, access to isotopically substituted ions make those pioneering studies very unique and prohibitively expensive to carry out nowadays. There are many review articles on molten salts, some of them cited in this perspective, that are simply outstanding and we dare not try to outdo those. Instead, having worked for almost a couple of decades already on their low-temperature relatives, the ionic liquids, this is the perspective article that some of the authors would have wanted to read when embarking on their research journey on high-temperature molten salts. We hope that this will serve as a simple guide to those expanding from research on ionic liquids to molten salts and , particularly, when looking into their bulk structural features. The article does not aim at being comprehensive but instead focuses on selected topics such as short- and intermediate-range order, the constraints on force field requirements, and other details that make the high- and low-temperature ionic melts in some ways similar but in others diametrically opposite.
由于这些系统在清洁和可持续能源收集和转换方面具有明显优势，高温熔盐研究近年来正在复兴。在许多方面，这是一个成熟的领域，如果不是已经有一个世纪的杰出工作，也有几十年的时间致力于这个领域。然而，这项工作中的大部分都是使用开创性的实验和计算设备完成的，这些设备缺乏当今同步加速器和高性能计算系统的能力，这导致文献中存在根深蒂固的结果，这些结果在仔细检查时可能需要修订。然而，在其他情况下，获得同位素取代离子使得这些开创性的研究非常独特，并且如今进行这些研究非常昂贵。有许多关于熔盐的综述文章，其中一些在本文中被引用，这些文章非常出色，我们不敢尝试超越它们。相反，我们已经在低温熔盐——离子液体的相关研究中工作了将近二十年，这是一些作者在开始研究高温熔盐时希望阅读的观点文章。我们希望这将成为那些从离子液体研究扩展到熔盐研究的人的一个简单指南，特别是在研究其体相结构特征时。本文的目的不是全面的，而是侧重于选择的主题，如短程和中程有序、对力场要求的约束，以及其他细节，这些细节使得高低温离子熔体在某些方面相似，但在其他方面则截然相反。
