Heterogeneous chiral catalysis on surfaces, in nanopores and with emulsions

Chiral catalysis is of great industrial interest for the production of enantiomerically pure compounds. Although many homogeneous chiral catalysts have been developed, the difficulty of the product purification and catalyst recycle is one of the obstacles of the practical applications. The design and synthesis of efficient and recyclable heterogeneous chiral catalysts remain the challenges and attracted much research interests in the past decades. The present work focuses on the design, synthesis, characterization and application of high performance heterogeneous chiral catalytic systems for the synthesis of fine chemicals and chiral pharmaceuticals. Heterogeneous chiral catalysts were prepared by various strategies such as covalent grafting, encapsulation, ion interaction, chiral modification, copolymerization and interphase assembly of amphiphilic molecules etc. Chiral catalysis on the surfaces, in the nanopores and with emulsions have been investigated for the asymmetric epoxidation, hydrogenation, hydroformylation, transfer hydrogenation, Diels-Alder, Aldol, and biocatalysis reactions. Some heterogeneous chiral catalysts have been demonstrated to be highly active, enantioselective, and readily recyclable. Very interesting phenomena such as pore confinement, nano-size effect, ligand acceleration, configuration reversal, and cooperative activation have been observed and the heterogeneous chiral catalytic mechanisms have been studied.