Molten Salts and Ionic Liquids Discussion Group

The MSDG (Molten Salts Discussion Group) was conceived at a meeting of the ‘founding fathers’ at the City University in 1963. It held its first informal meeting at BISRA Battersea (the laboratories of the British Iron and Steel Research Association) in the autumn of that year. Its first formal meeting was held at the Imperial Smelting Corporation, Avonmouth, in the summer of 1964, where the host was John Lumsden, who was well known for his thermodynamic studies of molten salts’ systems.

From the start, the group was strongly supportive of the application of fundamental research to industrial problems and applications, and over the first few years of the group held many meetings at industrial venues. One such venue was the Wilkinson Sword (Graviner) Laboratories at Colnbrook near the western end of the main runway at Heathrow. The first Chairman, Douglas Inman, remembered well meeting the French ‘grand homme des sels fondus’, Bernard Tremillon, the invited speaker at the Wilkinson Sword meeting, at the said airport.

Relationship with international community

As evinced above, the history of the Group is strongly entwined with European molten salts’ research and in particular with the European EUCHEM conferences on molten salts. The first of the latter conferences had been held in Norway in 1966 and the fourth conference in the series was organised by the MSDG at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester in 1972, under the chairmanship of Douglas Inman.

We became truly international at this meeting with, for example, a large representation from the USA, in particular of those associated with the MSRE (the molten salts‘ reactor experiment at Oak Ridge, Tennessee).

The Group also organised, again under the chairmanship of Douglas Inman, the 1988 12th meeting in the EUCHEM series at the University of St. Andrews, for which the local organiser was John Duffy. We also celebrated the 25th Anniversary of the MSDG at this meeting.

Name change

Over time, the MSDG membership began to incorporate an increasing number of researchers who focus upon ‘ionic liquids’ rather than ‘molten salts’, To better reflect the composition of the membership and attract more members, a name change from MSDG to MSDILG was suggested and formalised in 2018.

Founding Fathers and chair persons

The ‘founding fathers’ of the MSDG were:

• Tony Hart  of the CERL Leatherhead (the laboratories of the Central Electricity Generating Board), whose group was activein high temperature fuel cells and corrosion by molten salts;

• Roy Littlewood  of BISRA, who pioneered the use of predominance diagrams for molten salt systems which are analogous to the well known Pourbaix diagrams for aqueous systems. (In my opinion the molten salts’ diagrams should be called Littlewood diagrams);

• John Tomlinson  of the Nuffield Group in the Metallurgy Department at Imperial College, who was active in research at very high temperatures on molten silicates (a future chairman, Derek Fray, was one of his research students at the time !);

• Graham Hills , an electrochemist, from the Chemistry Department at Imperial College and subsequently of the Chemistry Department of the University of Southampton before leading Strathclyde University in Glasgow (he had helped to look after the residuum of the Bockris Group at IC when the latter moved to the USA);

• Douglas Inman  of the City University, who, at various institutions, had been active in molten salts‘ research since 1953.

There have only been nine Chairmen over the last 55 years: Douglas Inman of Imperial College London; David Kerridge of the University of Southampton; Brian Cleaver of the University of Southampton; John Duffy of the University of Aberdeen; Trevor Griffiths of the University of Leeds; Derek Fray of the University of Cambridge; Andrew Abbott of the University of Leicester; George Chen, University of Nottingham (Ningbo) and Andrew Doherty of the Queen's University of Belfast.