An Operational Model For A Well-Stirred Membrane Bioreactor: Reactor Performance Analysis

  • Professor Adesoji Adesina, University of New South Wales, Australia
  • Dr Harvinder Sidhu, Australian Defence Force Academy, Australia
  • Dr Mark Nelson, University of Wollongong, Australia

    • The use of an immobilised enzyme membrane bioreactor (IEMB) is an attractive option for the production of expensive bio-pharmaceuticals, and in highly specialised water treatment facilities, because of its intrinsic advantages regarding excellent product selectivity and high throughput delivery. However, the requirements for simultaneous bioreaction and in-situ product separation exposes the reactor to possible multiple steady-state solutions due to the coupling of nonlinear kinetics with transmembrane diffusion. In the present work, we investigate the character of the steady-state solution for a well-stirred IEMB featuring the Michaelis-Menten reaction scheme

    E+S = E-S,
    E-S = P + Q +E,

    where E is the active enzyme, S is the substrate, E-S is the enzyme-substrate complex and P, Q are reaction products. Although simple, this kinetic scheme is a prototype for the hydrolytic decomposition of urea by the enzme urenase to carbon dioxide and ammonia.