Dr. Othon Moultos is featured as an Emerging Investigator in the Journal of Chemical Physics

The work of Dr. Othon Moultos, assistant professor in the Process & Energy department, and his co-workers on deep eutectic solvents was recently published in the JCP Emerging Investigators Special Collection. This collection is highly selective and is meant to recognize the excellent work of early career investigators in the field of Physical Chemistry (within 10 years of PhD graduation). The success was double, since this article was also chosen as an Editor’s Pick (“hand-selected” articles that receive extra advertisement), showcasing the novelty and importance of this work.

In early 2022, a subcommittee of the JCP Editorial Advisory Board will also choose two winners from among the papers accepted to the special collection in 2021. Deep eutectic solvents are a class of designer solvents having superior thermophysical properties. For this reason, they are considered lately as a promising green alternative to the conventional volatile organic solvents.

To be invited in this special collection of JCP is a great honor for a young academic. It shows that all the hard work and accomplishments do not go unnoticed by the international community. It also shows a strong research momentum in the emerging field of deep eutectic solvents.

Despite the widespread acknowledgment that deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have negligible vapor pressures, very few studies in which they are actually measured or computed are available. Similarly, the vapor phase composition is known for only a few DESs. In this study, for the first time, the vapor pressures and vapor phase compositions of choline chloride urea (ChClU) and choline chloride ethylene glycol (ChClEg) DESs are computed using Monte Carlo simulations.

Hirad S. Salehi, H. Mert Polat, Frédérick de Meyer, Céline Houriez, Christophe Coquelet, Thijs J. H. Vlugt, and Othonas A. Moultos