Chemometric analysis of triglycerides hydrolysis in an enzyme membrane reactor

The work concerns hydrolysis of oil in a reactor with an ultrafiltration enzyme membrane. A phenomenological model of the reactor performance and its mathematical representation have earlier been elaborated according to a network thermodynamics approach by Schnakenberg.We try to explain when and why the process in the membrane reactor exhibits a typical consecutive kinetics, i.e., mono- and diglycerides are produced together with fatty acids and glycerol or only the latter two products are formed.The detailed discussion on the reactor performance at different levels of selected parameters is based on chemometric simulation procedure. The parameters were: the load density of lipase immobilised in the membrane, the rate constant of uncompetitive inhibition of the lipase catalyst, and the rate of convection streams of the circulating oil and aqueous phases.Planning of the simulation experiments has been done by the full factorial design technique while the cluster analysis has been used to discuss the resulted features of the reactor performances. This was possible after selection of the linkage distances between the particular clusters of simulated experiments, represented by “cumulative” points defined as the functions of all the product time courses in the simulated processes versus the normalised time.