The development of a thermosiphon photobioreactor and analysis using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

Cho, Bovinille Anye; Pott, Robert William McClelland

doi:10.1016/j.cej.2019.01.104

Cited by 29 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Like chemical reactors, the scaling-up of PBRs mainly involves the amplification law of momentum transport, energy transport, quality transport, and reaction engineering, which can be simulated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD). CFD is widely used in previous studies to simulate multiphase flow in chemical reactors, bioreactors, 10 and PBRs [11][12][13] with various structure designs. For instance, Dulce et al 14 evaluated the multiphase flow characteristic and cultivation of a photosynthetic microorganism in 50L and 150L traditional plate PBRs with vertical baffles.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale‐up of the cross‐flow flat‐plate airlift photobioreactor

Zhao

Peng

et al. 2020

Asia-Pacific J Chem Eng

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To commercialize large-scale and high-density microalgae cultivation, a 10L cross-flow flat-plate airlift photobioreactor (CFA-PBR) was designed and amplified to two types of 40L CFA-PBRs via different scaling-up methods. The multiphase flow characteristics and bioreaction process of these CFA-PBRs were studied by experiments and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. The results show that the parameters of CFA-PBRs, such as bubble size, gas holdup, mass transfer, and photosynthetic reaction efficiency, mainly conform to the principle of geometric similarity under the same light thickness and superficial gas velocity, which is significant for large-scale industrial applications of the efficient high-density algae cultivation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale‐up of the cross‐flow flat‐plate airlift photobioreactor

Zhao

Peng

et al. 2020

Asia-Pacific J Chem Eng

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“…The burden of experimentally investigating a variety of design and operational photobioreactor alternatives [19] motivates the development and validation of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. By such a model, further development of the sloping wavy-bottom photobioreactor can be fostered, as reported for other novel photobioreactors [20][21][22]. Development of such a CFD model is the object of the present work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Design and Bench-Scale Hydrodynamic Testing of Thin-Layer Wavy Photobioreactors

Moroni

Lorino

Cicci

et al. 2019

Water

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In a thin-volume photobioreactor where a concentrated suspension of microalgae is circulated throughout the established spatial irradiance gradient, microalgal cells experience a time-variable irradiance. Deploying this feature is the most convenient way of obtaining the so-called “flashing light” effect, improving biomass production in high irradiance. This work investigates the light flashing features of sloping wavy photobioreactors, a recently proposed type, by introducing and validating a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. Two characteristic flow zones (straight top-to-bottom stream and local recirculation stream), both effective toward light flashing, have been found and characterized: a recirculation-induced frequency of 3.7 Hz and straight flow-induced frequency of 5.6 Hz were estimated. If the channel slope is increased, the recirculation area becomes less stable while the recirculation frequency is nearly constant with flow rate. The validated CFD model is a mighty tool that could be reliably used to further increase the flashing frequency by optimizing the design, dimensions, installation, and operational parameters of the sloping wavy photobioreactor.

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“…Upon convergence, Equation (12) was solved with a time step size of 0.005 s for 100 s, with biomass growth and death rates being accelerated by 8640 times such that the 100-second simulation result is representative of the process behaviour for 10 days of biomass cultivation. This approximation is attributed to the fact that fluid dynamics converges more rapidly (order of seconds; Papacek et al, 2018) than cell growth (e.g., doubling time at an order of days; Bernstein, 2016;Liu et al, 2011). Even by accelerating biomass growth kinetics up to an order of minutes or hours, cells would have still experienced the light/dark cycles hundreds of times.…”

Section: Multiscale Model Coupling Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bio‐renewable products ranging from biofuels to more valuable components such as pigments and antioxidants have placed the cultivation of photosynthetic microorganisms, for example, microalgae and cyanobacteria in photobioreactors (PBRs) at the spotlight of biotechnological research. However, the economic viability of this biotechnology is hurdled by its high capital, operational, and maintenance cost due to difficulties in designing and upscaling of PBRs (Cho & Pott, 2019; Gómez‐Pérez et al, 2015; Gupta et al, 2015; Ross & Pott, 2021). In an attempt to bridge this gap, constructing advanced mathematical models to analyse the underlying process plays a vital role.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synergising biomass growth kinetics and transport mechanisms to simulate light/dark cycle effects on photo‐production systems

Cho

Servia

Chanona

et al. 2021

Biotech & Bioengineering

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Light attenuation is a primary challenge limiting the upscaling of photobioreactors for sustainable bio‐production. One key to this challenge, is to model and optimise the light/dark cycles so that cells within the dark region can be frequently transferred to the light region for photosynthesis. Therefore, this study proposes the first mechanistic model to integrate the light/dark cycle effects into biomass growth kinetics. This model was initially constructed through theoretical derivation based on the intracellular reaction kinetics, and was subsequently modified by embedding a new parameter, effective light coefficient, to account for the effects of culture mixing. To generate in silico process data, a new multiscale reactive transport modelling strategy was developed to couple fluid dynamics with biomass growth kinetics and light transmission. By comparing against previous experimental and computational studies, the multiscale model shows to be of high accuracy. Based on its simulation result, an original correlation was proposed to link effective light coefficient with photobioreactor gas inflow rate; this has not been done before. The impact of this study is that by using the proposed mechanistic model and correlation, we can easily control and optimise photobioreactor gas inflow rates to alleviate light attenuation and maintain a high biomass growth rate.

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The development of a thermosiphon photobioreactor and analysis using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

Cited by 29 publications

References 58 publications

Scale‐up of the cross‐flow flat‐plate airlift photobioreactor

Scale‐up of the cross‐flow flat‐plate airlift photobioreactor

Design and Bench-Scale Hydrodynamic Testing of Thin-Layer Wavy Photobioreactors

Synergising biomass growth kinetics and transport mechanisms to simulate light/dark cycle effects on photo‐production systems

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