New type of basket stationary bed reactor for heterogeneous biocatalysis

Effectiveness of catalytic processes using heterogeneous biocatalysts depends not only on the activity of the enzyme, but also on the efficiency of the used reactor. In this paper, we present a novel design of a basket reactor with a stationary catalyst bed (StatBioChem). The developed design was compared to a commercially available rotating bed reactor (SpinChem (R)). The biocatalysts used were invertase and acyltransferase from Mycobacterium smegmatis (MsAcT) immobilised on macroporous silica supports. The obtained values of initial reaction rate, both in the reaction of saccharose hydrolysis and 2,2-dimethyl-1,3-propanediol (NPG) transesterification, were twice higher for the StatBioChem reactor. A similar relationship was also observed regarding the process efficiency expressed as STY.