Fernández-Stefanuto, VerónicaSomoza Cerviño, AlbaCorchero Morais, RaquelTojo, EmiliaSoto Campos, Ana María2020-09-292020-09-292020Fernández-Stefanuto V, Somoza A, Corchero R, Tojo E and Soto A (2020) Design and Characterization of Naphthalene Ionic Liquids. Front. Chem. 8:208. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2020.00208http://hdl.handle.net/10347/23313Surfactants have a great number of applications. Among these chemicals, petroleum sulfonates have been widely used due to their effectiveness in reducing interfacial tension. This is the case of sodium octylnaphthalene sulfonate which is a solid with a very low solubility in water. To overcome these drawbacks, this work aimed to synthesize new surface active ionic liquids based on a naphthalene sulfonate anion and traditional cations of these salts (imidazolium, pyrrolidinium, and pyridinium). The new chemicals showed high thermal stability, ionic liquid nature, and a stronger surfactant character than the original naphthalene. Moreover, they were found to be water soluble which greatly facilitates their application in the form of aqueous formulations. 1-Hexyl-3-methylimidazolium 4-(n-octyl)naphthalene-1-sulfonate showed the best capacity to reduce water-air and water-oil interfacial tensionengCopyright © 2020 Fernández-Stefanuto, Somoza, Corchero, Tojo and Soto. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these termshttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/SynthesisCharacterizationSurfactantIonic liquidEnhanced oil recoveryjournal article2296-2646open access