Mathematical Modeling of Starch Particle Digestion: Taking Intrinsic
Granular Properties into Account
Abstract
Starch particle digestion is an important topic in food digestion
research. This study has developed a diffusion-reaction model to
characterize hindered enzyme diffusion and substrate hydrolysis on the
surface and in the interior of porous starch particles. A moving
boundary numerical method is applied to account for particle shrinkage
caused by surface reaction. This model has been proven to predict the
digestion rate of various starch particles of different sizes. The
parameter estimation procedure quantifies the properties that are hard
to measure by experimental techniques, i.e., diameter, reactive area,
and proportion of pores accessible for enzyme as well as susceptibility
of starch to enzyme. This work formulates a quantitative procedure for
identifying the particle digestion pattern (i.e., outside-in or
inside-out) by resorting to the developed model. Computational
experiments indicate that in addition to the internal architecture,
particle size also has a significant effect on the digestion pattern.