Starting Series reactor method

The hydrolysis of an IV-acylated amino acid by an enzyme provides a resolution method to amino acids. Because the starting materials are readily available in the racemic series by the Schotten-Baumann reaction, the method can be cost effective (Scheme 2.21).68-71 The L-amino acid product can be separated by crystallization, whereas the D-amino acid, which is still /V-acylated, can be recycled by being resubjected to the Schotten-Baumann conditions used for the next batch. Tanabe has developed a process with an immobilized enzyme,72 73 whereas Degussa uses the method in a membrane reactor.69 74 The process is used to make L-methionine. 

This expression contains a quadratic term, whose solution has two roots. Let us instead use the inverse of the above method start from the desired final conversion in the last reactor and calculate conversion or volume for the previous reactor. Note that the conversion in the first reactor should be positive. This method enables one to determine the volumes of the reactors in series using their inlet and outlet conversions. Therefore, rearranging Equation 17.11, we obtain ... 

Suppose now that we do not have the equation, but we have the experiment itself. We can fill up the stirred reactor with reactant at concentration Cq, run it for some time, and record the time series of c(t). Using the results of a short run (over, say, one minute), we can now estimate the slope, dc/dt at t=0, and predict (using the Euler method) where the concentration will be in, say 10 minutes. Now, instead of waiting nine minutes for the reactor to get there, we stop the experiment and immediately start a new one. We reinitialize the reactor at the predicted concentration, run for one more minute, and use forward Euler to predict what the concentration will be 20 minutes down the line. We are substituting short, appropriately initialized experiments, and estimation based on the experimental results, for the function evaluations that the subroutine with the closed form f(c) would return. We are in effect doing forward Euler again, but the coefficients of the local linear model are obtained using experimentation on demand (Cybenko, 1996) rather than function evaluations of an n priori available model. 

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