Study of hydrodynamic characteristics in tubular photobioreactors

Light/dark cycle enhancement and energy consumption of tubular microalgal photobioreactors with discrete double inclined ribs

“…It will be conducted in the future. In particle trajectory simulation, cells in this work were taken as inert particles as in most researches (Huang et al 2014;Gao et al 2017;Pruvost et al 2008;Zhang et al 2013Zhang et al , 2015, while in real world particles are not (Suali and Sarbatly 2012;Razzak et al 2013;Kreis et al 2018). A more accurate particle tracking model including the shape and biological properties may present more detailed and accurate particle trajectories.…”

“…However, the adding of mixers also increases energy consumption (mainly pumping costs). For instance, according to Zhang et al (2013), the simulated energy consumption (calculated by pressure drop) of the PBR with helical mixer was 0.3 J kg −1 m −1 , which was much higher than that of the smooth PBR (0.0136 J kg −1 m −1 ). It means that the energy consumption has increased almost by 2106% on inserting of the helical mixer.…”

CFD simulation for reduced energy costs in tubular photobioreactors using wall turbulence promoters

“…Reducing the recirculation flow velocity in tubular PBRs will result in important energy and cost savings. The analysis was based on an average flow velocity of 0.5 m/s, which is a common value used for commercial tubular PBRs [10][11][12][13][14]. Acién Fernández et al [14] and Molina et al [11] motivate the choice of the flow velocity by: 1) sufficient turbulence is required for mixing and to prevent biofilm formation, and 2) high flow velocities should be avoided to prevent cell stress.…”

“…L-shapes in tubular PBRs results in death zones and energy loss and therefore they redesigned the bend shapes with CFD. Other authors used CFD to optimize the mixing behaviour with good results [12,13,[19][20][21]. Perner-Nochta and Posten [12] simulated the fluid dynamics of tubular PBRs with static mixers.…”

“…They also presented different strategies to evaluate the data as a periodic function. Zhang et al [13] simulated the fluid dynamics with a helical static mixer, and discuss the design of the mixer. They validated the simulations by experiments in which the tubular PBR with static mixer is compared with a PBR without static mixer.…”