LAUSR

Abstract The paper presents a series of studies into the physicochemical properties such as density, viscosity and conductivity of acidic AlCl3–1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride ionic liquid (IL) at 30 °C. The ionic composition of the electrolyte is characterised by Raman spectroscopy. A study of the dependence of the ionic liquid specific conductivity on the concentration of AlCl3 at 0.50 ≤ xAl ≤ 0.67 (xAl is the mole fraction of AlCl3 in the melt) is undertaken. The plot of IL specific conductivity vs AlCl3 concentration smoothly decreases and does not contain any maxima across the investigated range of AlCl3 concentrations. A method of evaluating the transport numbers of chloroaluminate anions using only experimental data on conductivity, without performing additional experiments is proposed. A decrease in molar conductivity with the growth of AlCl3 concentration is found to be related to the decreasing total molar concentration of ions participating in charge carrying and the decreasing molar volume of the IL.