Towards a Deeper Understanding of Preferential Enrichment. A Case Study : DL Arginine Fumarate in Ethanol-Water 50-50 Mixture

Preferential Enrichment (PE) is an unusual spontaneous symmetry breaking phenomenon developed by Prof. Tamura’s group in the late nineties. Starting with a slightly enriched in one enantiomer, highly supersaturated solution, this out of equilibrium process permits the system to deviate from standard crystallization, in stagnant conditions, in order to obtain a highly enriched mother liquor and deposited crystals slightly enriched in the opposite enantiomer. The objective of this thesis is to assess the process of PE with the case study of Arginine Fumarate in water/ethanol mixture to obtain a better understanding of its mechanism. The main results of this work can be summarized as:– Using time monitoring performed by stopping experiments at 11 different times, PE appeared as a continuous process;– In situ X-Ray powder diffraction experiments showed that polymorphic transitions are not required for PE, different phases or successions of phases can achieve identical results of preferential enrichment;– Exchanges between enantiomers of mother liquor and the deposited crystals were demonstrated by addition of labeled-L-Arginine as counter enantiomer during experiments starting with an excess of D-Arginine.To conclude this work a revised mechanism for PE as a continuous process is proposed. Criteria to achieve PE are reduced to four: i) a strong difference of solubility between pure enantiomers and racemic compound; ii) the racemic compound should crystallize with a solid solution domain; iii) the system should stay stagnant during the complete process; iv) the initial composition should be in the appropriate zone of the phase diagram (e.g. for Arg-Fum system a e.e. < 12% and a β ≥ 4).