Roles of Ionic Liquids in Adjusting Nature of Ionogels: A Mini Review

Over the past two decades, the unique features of ionic liquids (ILs) drive their exploration and exploitation in gel field and endow the gels with many excellent properties including thermal stability, antifreezing capability, mechanical strength, self-healing, conductivity, and antibacterial performance. As promising functional materials, ionogels have attracted remarkable interest in various applications including flexible electronics, energy storage, and biomedical applications. This review aims to give a detailed overview of the recent advances in developing of IL-based task-specific ionogels. The effects of ILs on the ionogels’ formation and structure modification and their promotion on elevating these gel properties from the viewpoint of fundamental to the application are comprehensively discussed. The different interactions also discussed between ILs and other components in forming ionogels, such as hydrogen bond, electrostatic interaction, host–guest interaction, IL-philic and IL-phobic interaction, and introduced ILs’ dissolvability to biomass; and the unique capability of ionogels owing to ILs, such as conductivity, electrochemical stability, thermal stability, and antibacterial ability. Finally, the future challenges and perspectives of ionogels are outlooked.