Analysis of the transient response of a CSTR containing immobilized enzyme particles: Part I. Model development and analysis of the influence of operating conditions and process parameters

The transient response of the bulk substrate concentration in a CSTR containing immobilized enzyme (IMEs) in porous solid supports and the possibilities of exploiting the minimum behavior for parameter estimation purposes are studied in this work. For that purpose, mathematical models have been developed for several kinetic expressions with parallel deactivation mechanisms and for two different particle shapes (cylindrical and spherical). The influence of a number of system variables and non-dimensional parameters, i.e., pellet radius, mass of particles, flow rate, effective diffusivity, mass transfer coefficient, Thiele modulus, Michaelis constant, and enzyme deactivation constant, is also reported in a systematic way. Simulations, using realistic data, show that the minimum bulk substrate concentration is sufficiently pronounced and the time scale for the minimum to occur is sufficiently practical, so that it can be used to extract several parameters of the immobilized enzyme system.