Synthesis of AgCl nanoparticles based on ionic liquid microemulsions and preparation of AgCl/C12mimCl-PMMA hybrid membranes

A new type of microemulsions, ionic liquid microemulsion, was presented in this paper. In this microemulsion system, ionic liquid (1-dodecyl-3-methyl imidazoium chloride) served as the surfactant. AgCl nanoparticles were prepared by direct precipitation of silver ions with the surfactant counter ion Cl^- in the water pools of C₁₂mimCl/H₂O/MMA reverse microemulsions. And then nano-AgCl/C₁₂mimCl-PMMA hybrid membranes were prepared by situ microemulsions polymerization. The ternary phase diagram showed that C₁₂ mimCl was a good surfactant, it not only had a high solution capacity of MMA, also enhanced the solubilization of water in microemulsions significantly. The results of UV-vis and TEM proved that the formation and size of AgCl nanoparticles could be effected by changing the structure parameters of microemulsion. Meanwhile the swelling-sorption behaviors of the cyclohexane/cyclohexene in hybrid membranes were studied. The results indicated that the hybrid membranes´ maximum swelling-sorption amount of cyclohexene was much larger than that of cyclohexane. All results suggested that the hybrid membranes including AgCl nanoparticles had potential applications in green chemistry.