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Candida antarctica lipase B (CALB) is an enzyme able to catalyze chemical reaction, however when it is used as a free enzyme, it cannot be recovered from reaction medium. One of the alternatives is to immobilize the enzymes on a support which allows the maintenance of their catalytic activities. The purpose of this paper was to immobilize the CALB on MCM-48 using the ionic solid [C16MI]Cl as structure director. 22 CCRD (Central Composite Rotational Design) was proposed to analyze the influence of the variables like enzyme mass (0.059 to 0.341 g) and ionic solid concentration (0.59 to 3.41%) in the enzyme immobilization process to obtain the maximum esterification activity in order to optimize the process. After immobilization, the study results showed that the enzymes exhibited improvement of thermal (40, 60 and 80 ºC) and storage stability (90 days), besides the possibility to reuse of the enzyme up to 10 times, showing residual activity of 50%.

This study reports the optimization of geranyl butanoate production by esterification of geraniol and butanoic acid in a solvent-free system using two immobilized lipases as catalyst. The operating conditions that optimized geranyl butanoate production were determined to be 40 °C, a geraniol to butanoic acid molar ratio of 3:1, 150 rpm, 5 wt% of enzyme, and 1 h of reaction, which resulted in a reaction conversion of about 97% for Novozyme 435. When homemade Novozyme NZL-102-LYO-HQ (Cal-B) immobilized in polyurethane foam was used as catalyst, the experimental conditions of an alcohol to acid molar ratio of 5:1, 70 °C, 150 rpm, 5 wt% of enzyme, and 1 h of reaction gave a conversion of 95%. New experimental data on enzymatic esterification of geraniol and butanoic acid for geranyl butanoate production are reported in this work, showing that the technique is promising for overcoming the well-known drawbacks of the chemical-catalyzed route.