A Brief Guide to the Structure of High-Temperature Molten Salts and Key Aspects Making Them Different from Their Low-Temperature Relatives, the Ionic Liquids

High-temperature molten salt research is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance these days due to the apparent advantage of these systems in areas related to clean and sustainable energy harvesting and transfer. In many ways, this is a mature field with decades if not already a century of outstanding work devoted to it. Yet, much of this work was done with pioneering experimental and computational setups that lack the current day capabilities of synchrotrons and high-performance-computing systems resulting in deeply entrenched results in the literature that when carefully inspected may require revision. Yet, in other cases, access to isotopically substituted ions make those pioneering studies very unique and prohibitively expensive to carry out nowadays. There are many review articles on molten salts, some of them cited in this perspective, that are simply outstanding and we dare not try to outdo those. Instead, having worked for almost a couple of decades already on their low-temperature relatives, the ionic liquids, this is the perspective article that some of the authors would have wanted to read when embarking on their research journey on high-temperature molten salts. We hope that this will serve as a simple guide to those expanding from research on ionic liquids to molten salts and vice versa, particularly, when looking into their bulk structural features. The article does not aim at being comprehensive but instead focuses on selected topics such as short- and intermediate-range order, the constraints on force field requirements, and other details that make the high- and low-temperature ionic melts in some ways similar but in others diametrically opposite.

Automated summary

Research on high-temperature molten salts is experiencing a resurgence due to their advantages in clean and sustainable energy applications. Past studies may require revision due to limitations in experimental setups, while access to isotopically substituted ions presents challenges for current research. This perspective article aims to provide a guide for researchers transitioning between ionic liquids and molten salts, focusing on structural features and force field requirements.