Designing silica xerogels containing RTIL for CO capture and CO/CH separation: Influence of ILs anion, cation and cation side alkyl chain length and ramification.

CO separation from natural gas is considered to be a crucial strategy to mitigate global warming problems, meet product specification, pipeline specs and other application specific requirements. Silica xerogels (SX) are considered to be potential materials for CO capture due to their high specific surface area. Thus, a series of silica xerogels functionalized with imidazolium, phosphonium, ammonium and pyridinium-based room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) were synthesized.