First, a functionalised aldehyde containing a bulky imidazolium ionic liquid, denoted [Ald-IM][NTf2], was designed and synthesised based on known literature methods (Fig. ). This ionic liquid derived aldehyde was initially synthesised with chloride as the counterion, but subsequently exchanged for the larger and bulkier NTf2 counterions -the rationale for this was two-fold. First, the behaviour of ionic compounds is typically dominated by the electrostatic forces that hold the cations and anions together, which obey Coulomb's inverse-square law: