Multicompartment/CFD modelling of transport and reaction processes in Couette-Taylor photobioreactor

Abstract

A hybrid multicompartment/CFD modelling approach, introduced by Bezzo et al. (2003), describing processes with much faster fluid dynamics time-scale than the reaction rate, is used to characterise microalgal growth in a photobioreactor. Our system of interest, the Couette-Taylor bioreactor (CTBR), is divided into a network of wellmixed compartments. Photosynthetic reactions and other related phenomena are described in each compartment by an ordinary differential equation (ODE). The flow of neutrally-buoyant particles, representing a continuous mass flow of microalgal cells inside CTBR, is simulated by a steady-state computational fluid dynamics (CFD) computations. The flow rates between adjacent compartments are derived from several thousand predicted trajectories, post-processed using MATLABr, accordingly to our original method. The resulting governing equations are formed as a system of nc (total number of compartments) ODE’s, which are easier to handle than the large system of equations rising from a reaction phenomena incorporated in CFD models.