Experiments and simulation on extraction of esmolol enantiomers from single stage to multistage

•Experiments and modeling multiple chemical equilibriums for extraction of esmolol enantiomers are performed.•Thermodynamic parameters are obtained by experiments and data regression.•Symmetric separation is employed to simultaneously obtain high optical purity of R-esmolol and S-esmolol.•10 stages are enough to obtain high optical purity of S-esmolol (ee = 0.98) using asymmetric separation.