A Fortran Program for Evaluation of the Effectiveness Factor of Biocatalysts in the Presence of External and Internal Diffusional Limitations

A Fortran program called SPEFF for evaluation of the effectiveness factor of immobilized enzyme preparations of spherical form in the presence of external and internal mass transfer resistances is described, and a listing of the program is given. Enzyme distribution in the bioparticle may be uniform or nonuniform. In the latter case the enzyme distribution is approximated by fifth-order polynomial. In the program differential equations are replaced by the system of non-linear algebraic equations, and the latter are solved by Newton iteration technique. The program is developed for Michaelis-Menten kinetics with allowance for competitive product inhibition and substrate inhibition. After slight modifications the program can be used for computation of the effectiveness factor of a membrane with an immobilized enzyme, or in the case when the enzyme kinetics are more complex. A typical run on a PDP-11/45 computer took 10-20 seconds. A typical computation time in the case of IBM-compatible TURBO PC was 15-30 seconds.