Distillative Self-Sorting of Dynamic Ester Libraries

Metal alkoxides, such as NaOt-Bu or Ti(OBu)(4), can initiate acyl exchange within complex ester libraries. Reactive distillation of such dynamic combinatorial libraries (DCLs) isolates the most volatile ester at the expense of the less volatile library members that share a constituent with it. This process can be iteratively repeated to yield up to four industrially relevant esters as pure products from a single reaction setup. An algorithm has been developed to predict reactive distillation products in DCLs of as many as 121 members.