Assessment of different kinetic models for the production of fructo‐oligosaccharides through enzymatic synthesis

Abstract

Understanding the reaction mechanism of fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) synthesis enables the adaptation of operational conditions, ensuring the attainment of the desired final product, and mathematical modeling is a great tool for this purpose. The objective in this work is to adapt and analyze different models designed for enzymatic synthesis of FOS found in the consulted bibliography. Two approaches for the reaction mechanism, chain reaction and ping-pong, were included in the analysis and genetic algorithm was implemented to find the best fit. Both approaches offered good results, chain reaction approach showed lower overall relative errors (below 8.5%) while ping-pong mechanism best fit presented an overall error of 10.5%. No matter the approach used for the reaction mechanism, the models with best fit involved the concept of glucose inhibition for the transfructosylation reaction. Choosing different objective functions can be a great tool to equalize and reduce the relative errors when the model struggled to describe the behavior of one component in particular. The sensitive analysis helps to evaluate all the variables such as reaction rate, time, productivity, and FOS yield, to find an optimal reaction condition.