Insights into Ionic Liquids for Flame Retardant: A Study Based on Bibliometric Mapping

Fire is a typical disaster in the processing industry. Ionic liquids, as a type of green flame retardant, play an important role in process safety. In order to grasp the current research status, hotspots, and frontiers in the field of ionic liquids in flame retardancy, the bibliometric mapping method is applied to study the relevant literature in Web of Science datasets from 2000-2022 in this paper. The results show that the research on ionic liquids in flame retardancy is multidisciplinary and involves some disciplines such as energy science, material science, and environmental protection. Journal of Power Sources, Polymer Degradation and Stability, ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, and Chemical Engineering Journal are the core journals in the field. The results of keyword co-occurrence indicate that the hotspots of research can be divided into five components: the improvement and application of pure ionic liquids electrolytes, the research of gel polymer electrolytes, applying ionic liquids to enhance the polymer materials' flame retardancy properties, utilizing ionic liquids and inorganic materials to synergize flame retardant polymers, and using ionic liquids flame retardant to improve material's multiple properties. The burst terms and time zone diagram's results point out the combination of computational quantum chemistry to study the flame retardancy mechanism of ionic liquids, the study of fluorinated electrolytes, ionic liquids for smoke suppression, phosphorus-containing ionic liquids for flame retardant, and machine learning-assisted design of ILs flame retardants are the research frontiers and future research trends.

Automated summary

Research on ionic liquids in flame retardancy is multidisciplinary, with hotspots including the improvement and application of pure ionic liquid electrolytes, the study of gel polymer electrolytes, the use of ionic liquids to enhance the flame retardancy properties of polymer materials, the synergy of ionic liquids and inorganic materials in flame retardant polymers, and the use of ionic liquids as flame retardants to improve material properties. The research frontiers and future trends involve the combination of computational quantum chemistry to study the flame retardancy mechanism of ionic liquids, the study of fluorinated electrolytes, the use of ionic liquids for smoke suppression, the study of phosphorus-containing ionic liquids as flame retardants, and machine learning-assisted design of ionic liquids flame retardants.