The Importance of Ionic Liquids and Applications on Their Molecular Modeling

Abstract

Ionic liquids are salts with melting points generally below 100 °C made of entirely ions by the combination of a large cation and a group of anions. Some ionic liquids are found to have therapeutic properties due to their toxic effects (e.g., anticancer, antibacterial, and antifungal properties). The determination of the most stable molecular structures, that is, the lowest energy conformer of these ionic liquids with versatile biological activities, is of particular importance. Density function theory (DFT) based on quantum mechanical calculation method, one of the molecular modeling methods, is widely used in physics and chemistry to determine the electronic structures of these stable geometries and molecules. With the theory, the energy of the molecule is determined by using the electron density instead of the wave function. It is observed that the theoretical models developed on the ionic liquids in the literature are in agreement with the experimental results because of electron correlations included in the calculation.