Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate a new bio-electrochemical technique based on the utilisation of electric potential to enhance the enzymatic reaction. The efficiency of bio-electrochemical reactor has been achieved by studying the production of reducing sugar by enzymatic hydrolysis of olive mill. The results indicate that the application of a continuous electric potential of about 50 mV allowed a significant increase of the saccharification efficiency by about 25% (compared to an enzymatic process without electric potential). For an electric potential higher than 60 mV, the saccharification efficiency decreased, suggesting that the enzyme, a biological substance, could be damaged at high electric potential. It has been shown that the kinetics of the bio-catalyzed reactions could be controlled by an applied electric potential.
Highlights
The use of an electric field or an electric potential to improve the performance of the processes has been applied through several techniques such as ultrafiltration and electrosorption [1,2,3]
It was observed that the solid olive mill residue (SOMR) must be pre-treated by NaOH to be efficiently hydrolysed by the T. reesei’s enzyme
After the first hour of hydrolyse, it was noticed that the pre-treated SOMR revealed better results than the untreated SOMR
Summary
The use of an electric field or an electric potential to improve the performance of the processes has been applied through several techniques such as ultrafiltration and electrosorption [1,2,3]. The use of an electric field has not been studied yet in an enzymatic process. A new analysis technique using a field-effect bio-detector based on the application of a gating voltage to immobilized enzymes on the working electrode of the detector was presented [5,6]. The main purpose of this work was the determination of the ability of the electric potential to increase the enzymatic process efficiency. The effect of the electric field on the enzymatic reactor efficiency was studied using the Trichoderma reesei enzyme and olive mill substrate as a biocatalytic system. This work was aimed to be achieved by adopting optimal conditions obtained from a previously batch mode experiment [7], i.e. pH 5, T=50°C and Enzyme to Substrate ratio of 0.1 g enzymes/g olive mill
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