Chiral materials are usually the key to the separation of chiral membranes. Researchers at Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) proposed a new strategy that chiral porous graphene membrane can be fabricated from nonchiral porous graphene by mechanical stirring to induce vortex structure. Porous graphene with controlled, nanosized pores was synthesized by a newly designed, one-pot process directly from graphite as opposed to graphene oxide. Then porous graphene was immobilized on ultrafiltration membrane through filtering while stirring to form porous graphene membrane, which was applied for enantioselective separation toward DL-amino acids: for example, the separation factor of l-/d-phenylalanine reached 4.76. Interestingly, we first observed that the front and back sides of the porous graphene membrane exhibited opposite optical activities.
This work was recently published in Analytical Chemistry; PhD student TAN Hongxin at UCAS (institute: Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, CAS) is the first author; Prof. TAN Hongxin and Prof. QIU Hongdeng at Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences are the corresponding authors. Prof. QIU is also a doctoral supervisor at UCAS.
