A quantitative thermodynamic metric for identifying deep eutectic solvents

Abstract

Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) are a rapidly expanding class of liquid phase mixtures that offer many useful features. However, there currently exists no widely accepted criterion to identify whether or not a particular mixture is, in fact, a DES. This study introduces a quantitative metric based on the molar excess Gibbs energy of a eutectic mixture and proposes a threshold value in order to classify a eutectic system as a DES.