How performance of a recycle plug flow reactor is optimized for protease-driven autocatalytic reactions

Abstract

The balance equations to a continuous plug flow recycle reactor performing a protease-mediated autocatalytic reaction were analytically developed under the assumption of a Michaelis-Menten type of mechanism. The necessary condition for the recycle ratio that leads to the minimum reactor volume was set up and the resulting expression was numerically solved for the optimum ratio of recycle, Ropt, as a function of the desired conversion of reactant (or pro-enzyme) into product (or enzyme), XP-E, for selected values of the relevant dimensionless parameters,i.e. the ratio of total concentrations of enzyme and product moieties, c, and the ratio of the Michaelis-Menten parameter to the total concentration of product moiety, K m. It was numerically proven that variation of K m by ®ve orders of magnitude centered around unity did not affect Ropt to a significant extent, whereas an empirical expression for Ropt versus c and XP-E could be found and successfully fitted to the results of several numerical runs.