Rotating bed reactor packed with heterofunctional structured
silica-supported lipase or Novozym 435. Developing an effective system
for the organic solvent and aqueous phase reactions
Abstract
Production of specialty chemicals increasingly makes use of enzyme
catalysts, and Novozym 435 (N435) is among most often applied. However,
its polymeric skeleton is unstable in many solvents. In this context, we
report results of a systematic study of the biocatalysts, fabricated
using highly porous siliceous pellets/enzyme (MH), grafted with octyl
(-O), amino (-A) and octyl and amino (-OA) groups, deployed in a
rotating bed reactor and tested in hydrolysis and esterification
reactions. N435 appeared the most active in both reactions, when
activity was related to the catalyst’s mass, mainly owing to very large
enzyme load. But its structure degraded in many typical solvents,
whereas no such effect was detected in MH-O- and MH-OA-catalysts. MH-O
showed the highest specific activity, however, a significant enzyme
leaching was observed in a hydrolytic reaction, in contrast to MH-OA. In
esterification reaction the MH-O-bound lipase was not only most active
but also quite stable.