Ionic Liquid‐Based Stimuli‐Responsive Functional Materials

Ionic liquids (ILs) have many attractive properties. For example, their physical and chemical properties can be tuned by a judicious design of the cations and anions, making them ideal candidates for designable building blocks of stimuli‐responsive materials. Numerous IL‐based stimuli‐responsive materials have been developed by chemical modification (covalent, coordination, or ionic functionalization) or physical blending of ILs with other functional materials. The flexible tunability of ILs provides a great opportunity to achieve the desired physicochemical properties for task‐specific applications, such as sensing, display, gas capture, and so on. This review aims to address the recent advances in IL‐based stimuli‐responsive materials, which are categorized by the type of external stimuli, including gas‐responsive, organic solvent‐responsive, ion‐responsive, pH‐responsive, thermo‐responsive, photo‐responsive, and electro‐responsive materials. The attractive properties of ionic liquids make them ideal candidates for designable building blocks of stimuli‐responsive materials. This review aims to address the recent advances in ionic liquid‐based stimuli‐responsive materials and they are categorized by the type of external stimuli, including gas‐responsive, organic solvent‐responsive, ion‐responsive, pH‐responsive, thermo‐responsive, photo‐responsive, and electro‐responsive materials.