Chiral separation membranes have shown great potential for efficient separation of racemic mixtures into enantiopure components for many applications such as in food and pharmaceutical industries; however, scalable fabrication of membranes with both high enantioselectivity and flux remains a challenge. Herein, enantiopure S -poly(2,4-dimethyl-2-oxazoline) ( S -PdMeOx) macromonomers were synthesized and used to prepare a new type of enantioselective membrane consisting of a chiral S -PdMeOx network scaffolded by graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets. The S -PdMeOx-based membrane showed near-quantitative enantiomeric excess ( ee ) (98.3 ± 1.7%) of S -(-)-limonene over R -(+)-limonene and a flux of 0.32 mmol m -2 h -1 . This work demonstrates the potential of homochiral poly(2,4-disubstituted-2-oxazoline)s in chiral discrimination and provides a new route to the development of highly efficient enantioselective membranes using synthetic homochiral polymer networks.
Published in: "Angewandte Chemie International Edition".