Photopolymerization of Ionic Liquids – A Mutually Beneficial Approach for Materials Fabrication

Abstract

Photopolymerization is a convenient fabrication technique with the power to control the polymerization in both time and space, be solvent free, and use simple equipment to initiate the polymerization reaction. These features are conditional on use of liquid monomers and crosslinkers that do not require solvent for processing. One class of compounds that provides these opportunities are ionic liquid (IL) monomers, which possess negligible vapour pressure and are free-flowing liquids at room temperature. For these reasons, ILs and photopolymerization are complementary to each other towards the fabrication of electrolyte materials by circumventing the innate difficulty in processing PILs as melts. Instead, the electrolyte polymer is formed as a crosslinked material directly where it will be used. In this review, we outline recent work demonstrating the key benefits of this unlikely marriage, including formulation design, applications in coatings, membranes, and others.