Performance of Ionic Liquid-water mixtures in an Acetone Cooling Application

In this work, the performance of selected ionic liquid-water mixtures was investigated for an acetone cooling application in a process plant. It is required to cool acetone using a double pipe heat exchanger. Acetone is generally used as solvent for greases and petroleum products. Cool-ing mediums such as river water and ionic liquid-water mixtures were considered. Wa-ter-saturated quaternary phosphonium based carboxylate ionic liquids were considered in this work. Ionic liquids generally have higher thermal stability, resist degradation, and provide higher temperatures at low vapor pressures. For these reasons, ionic liquids can be a good sub-stitute for conventional heat transfer fluids. In this work, the performance of ionic liquid mix-tures was considered for a sensible cooling application at around ambient conditions. At each instance, the performance of the ionic liquid mixture was compared with that of water. For the designated cooling application, the performance of water was much better than the ionic liquid mixtures.