A CFD coupled photo-bioreactive transport modelling of tubular photobioreactor mixed by peristaltic pump

[Display omitted] •Externally pumped-recirculated photobioreactors (PBRs) proffers pure biohydrogen.•The PBR’s CFD modelling framework under uncertainty was presented herein.•The framework’s computational cost requirements and savings were detailed.•Combined accelerated growth kinetics and parallel...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Chemical engineering science 2023-04, Vol.270, p.118525, Article 118525
Main Authors: Anye Cho, Bovinille, Grobler, Elze, William McClelland Pott, Robert, Antonio del Río Chanona‬, Ehecatl, Zhang, Dongda
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biohydrogen production
Biokinetic modelling
CFD modelling
Tubular photobioreactor
Uncertainty analysis
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:[Display omitted] •Externally pumped-recirculated photobioreactors (PBRs) proffers pure biohydrogen.•The PBR’s CFD modelling framework under uncertainty was presented herein.•The framework’s computational cost requirements and savings were detailed.•Combined accelerated growth kinetics and parallel computing reduces compute times.•Enhanced radial mixing was suggested to mitigate stagnant near-wall regions. Optimisation and upscaling of biohydrogen production in externally pumped-recirculated photobioreactors (PBRs) are hampered by the infeasible computational cost of coupling hydrodynamics, to light transmission and bioreaction transport, through the column and peristaltic pump. This study approximates the complexities of peristaltic pump with inlet–outlet boundary conditions (BCs), introduces mean residence time (tm) for updating BCs, and unifies tm-dependent accelerated growth kinetics to parallelised Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) environment. Due to superior cost-savings compared to previous CFD studies, the bioprocess reliability under 5% coupled CFD-photo-bioreaction parameter uncertainties was investigated for the first time, and thoroughly validated with literature bioreaction data for a 1L PBR. The results agreed to within 10% of error for simulated velocities, identifying undesired regions with poor radial mixing, and showed similar output uncertainties between the coupled CFD-photo-bioreactions and pure photo-bioreactions models, indicating absence of numerical diffusion. Therefore, this approach has great potentials for modelling other similar biosystems.
ISSN:0009-2509
1873-4405
DOI:10.1016/j.ces.2023.118525