Abstract
The use of membrane reactors for enzymatic and co-factor regenerating reactions offers versatile advantages such as higher conversion rates and space-time-yields and is therefore often applied in industry. However, currently available screening and kinetics characterization systems are based on batch and fed-batch operated reactors and were developed for whole cell biotransformations rather than for enzymatic catalysis. Therefore, the data obtained from such systems has only limited transferability for continuous membrane reactors. The aim of this study is to evaluate and to improve a novel screening and characterization system based on the membrane reactor concept using the enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose as a model reaction. Important aspects for the applicability of the developed system such as long-term stability and reproducibility of continuous experiments were very high. The concept used for flow control and fouling suppression allowed control of the residence time with a high degree of precision (±1% accuracy) in a long-term study (>100 h).
Highlights
Enzyme membrane reactors have been shown to be suitable for different types of reactions such as hydrolysis of macromolecules, cofactor-regenerating reactions, hydrolysis catalyzed by lipases or reactions in reverse micelles [1]
Due to the fact that currently available screening systems can mainly only be operated in batch or fed-batch mode, the screening results achieved in such conditions can be misleading for membrane reactor application and operation
The potential of a new continuous enzyme screening and characterization system was shown using the enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose as a model reaction
Summary
Enzyme membrane reactors have been shown to be suitable for different types of reactions such as hydrolysis of macromolecules, cofactor-regenerating reactions, hydrolysis catalyzed by lipases or reactions in reverse micelles [1]. In contrast to industrial systems, this small scale presents different challenges which have to be overcome in the design of such a screening and characterization system: precise control of flow rates at such small values, parallelism, characterization and scalability of power input, etc. This study aims to evaluate the first results achieved from the novel membrane-based screening system developed in our previous study [4] in terms of long-term stability, fouling control, parallelism of reactors and reproducibility of results. The main features of the developed system are: Possibility of continuous substrate feeding and continuous product removal; Suitability for homogeneous catalysis (non-immobilized enzymes can be used, since mass transfer limitations are smaller in comparison to the use of immobilized enzymes); Monitoring and control of temperature, pH, residence time and power input; Possibility of parallel operation (initially two reactors in parallel have been implemented); Low price
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