5. Conclusion

We can conclude that ionic liquids are very promising and can be considered for improving existing processes or developing new ones. It should also be noted that the development of ionic liquids requires very specific expertise which, like analytical chemistry or information technology, can be said to define a real profession. However, developing such solvents is not a goal in itself. In fact, ionic liquids are useful technological and scientific tools for other applications whose practical purposes are much more obvious. The examples cited in this article represent a non-exhaustive and even rather limited range of potential applications in electrochemistry.

Despite the very promising results obtained in numerous laboratories over the past 40 years, truly industrialized applications are still very rare, for three major reasons:

• ...