Quasi steady state approximation in enzymatic biopolymerization reactor

Biopolymer has become one of the recent trends for alternative materials in this decade. The rising awareness towards environmental issues has sparked the idea of creating alternative materials to gradually replace the existing petroleum based polymer. Polycaprolactone (PCL) is amongst the biopolymer that has emerged to be a commercial biopolymer. This work focuses on the kinetics of the biopolymerization process in a reactor for PCL. Mathematical representation of biopolymerization process was derived based on Quasi Steady State Approximation proposed by Briggs and Haldane. The model was developed to infer the molecular weight of the biopolymer which is based on the mechanistic model of the biopolymerization reaction. Based on the results, the molecular weight can be successfully predicted by the developed mathematical model based on the Quasi Steady State Approximation method. Comparison was also carried out between actual molecular weight from experimental works and simulated molecular weight from the mathematical model. The analysis on the mathematical model predictions were conducted using statistical means was also presented in this paper.