Ionic Liquids In Analytical Chemistry And Calix[4]arene Chemistry Of NOx Gases

Application of ionic liquids (ILs) in analytical chemistry can be numerous. The use of ILs in analytical techniques including gas chromatography (GC), electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS), capillary electrophoresis (CE), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), solid phase microextraction (SPME) and spectroscopy have attracted great attention of scientific community in the past few decades. Many advancements in this field are due to the development of multiply charged, multifunctional ionic liquids.This dissertation mainly consists of two parts. The first part focuses on the use of new, structurally diverse, chemically robust ionic liquids for GC, SPME and ESI-MS applications. Within this section, highly thermally stable GC stationary phases with unique selectivities developed using ILs will be discussed. The design and synthesis of new, flexible linear tricationic ILs will also be discussed. The use of these flexible tricationic ILs as ion pairing reagents in ultra-high sensitive detection of dianionic species in the positive mode of ESI-MS will be presented. Finally, development of a new IL-based silica-bonded polymeric material for SPME-GC headspace and direct immersion analysis will be discussed. The second part of this dissertation focuses on the use of calix[4]arene-based supramolecular architectures for the complexation of NOx gases. These calix[4]arene-NO+ complexes which were prepared by reacting calix[4]arene derivatives with environmentally toxic nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) gas, were then simply reduced for cleaner generation of medicinally important nitric oxide (NO) gas.