Novel crystallization techniques for separation in multi-component systems

Abstract

Crystallization-based chiral resolution techniques was born when Pasteur discovered the chirality of tartaric acid and manually separated its two enantiopure crystals by his tweezers. Ever since then, these techniques have been in constant development, mainly due to the needs from the pharmaceutical and food industries. In the past decades, techniques such as preferential crystallization have been studied and some of them have already been applied at pilot scale. Deracemization is of more recent date and is actually the process that stirs up attention in chiral resolution the last few years. These techniques draw more and more attention from both academic world and the industries owing to one common feature: the potential to recover the desired enantiomer with unrivaled high product purity in a single process step.