Development of the enzymatic kinetics model of vegetable oils transesterification for biodiesel production

Currently the technology of enzymatic production of biodiesel is more promising than that based on chemical methods, using acidic or basic catalysts. The enzyme lipase used as catalyst in this process can be isolated from microorganisms such as Pseudomonas fluorescens, P. cepacia, Candida antarctica among others. In this work, a mechanism for the transesterification of triglycerides catalyzed by lipase for production of biodiesel is proposed. The process was modeled in three consecutive reactions where diglycerides and monoglycerides were formed. Other three intermediate stages involving lipase were considered. The identification of parameters with the developed model was performed for reaction conditions where stoichiometric amount of reagents were used. The developed model was tested for different operational conditions with experimental data found in the literature. The simulation results showed good model flexibility.