Towards High-efficient Chiral Separation Using Hierarchically Porous HROP@silica-gel-sheet Composite.

Abstract

Separating racemates is still a great challenge for their similarity in chemical structures and physicochemical properties. Despite exhibiting a significant potential in the adsorption separation due to their intrinsic characteristics, hierarchically porous materials utilized in enantioseparation have rarely been reported to date. Furthermore, the molding of such materials together with their hybrid organic-inorganic monoliths is generally required to meet various prerequisites in the diverse large-scale industrial applications, but without sacrificing their inherently hierarchical architectures. In this work, a three-dimensional hierarchically porous organic-inorganic composite was simply and feasibly prepared via integrating the micro/meso-porous hypercrosslinked resin organic polymer (HROP) with macroporous silica gel sheet (SGS), followed by a chiral selector postmodification, named as HROP@SGS. Racemic 1-phenylethanol, ibuprofen and naproxen could be separated only using such a piece of HROP@SGS as the filler with a solid phase extraction technique. Herein, HROP@SGS exhibited extraordinary chiral resolution performances and succeeded in achieving a complete chiral resolution. Our findings suggest that this simple strategy proposed by us, i.e., combining the chiral micro/mesoporous organic materials with macroporous inorganic substrates, can be employed to prepare an unprecedented enantioseparation material, which has a promising potential in large-scale industrial applications, such as fixed-bed and membrane separation.