Experimental behaviour and design model of a fluidized bed reactor with immobilized peroxidase for phenol removal

In this work, immobilized derivatives of soybean peroxidase, covalently bound to glass supports with different surface areas, were used in a laboratory scale fluidized bed reactor to study their viability for use in phenol removal. The influence of the different operational variables on the process was also studied. When derivatives immobilized on supports with the highest surface area were used, 80% removal was achieved.Since knowledge of the removal process in the fluidized bed reactor and its simulation is vital before a continuous industrial scale process can be proposed, a reactor model based on the experimental results that predicts the system's behaviour both in steady and transient state was developed. The model considers the fluidized bed reactor as a plug flow reactor in series with an ideal mixer and follows a kinetic law based on the observed external mass transfer resistances in order to work out the process rate.The values of the model parameters were obtained by fitting phenol conversion values obtained experimentally to the model, using the CurveExpert, V 1.3, software.The good agreement obtained between the experimental and calculated values of phenol conversion demonstrates that the model is valid as a predictive model for using this reactor configuration.