Sufficient mixing is crucial for the proper performance of anaerobic digestion (AD), creating a homogeneous distribution of soluble substrates, biomass, pH, and temperature. The opaqueness of the sludge and mode of operation make it challenging to study AD mixing experimentally. Therefore, hydrodynamics modelling employing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is often used to investigate this mixing. However, CFD models mostly do not include biochemical reactions and, hence, ignore the effect of diffusion-induced transport on AD heterogeneity. The novelty of this work is the partial integration of Anaerobic Digestion Model no. 1 (ADM1) into the CFD model. The aim is to better understand the effect of advection-diffusion transport on the homogenization of soluble substrates and biomass. Furthermore, AD homogeneity analysis in terms of concentration distribution is proposed rather than the traditional velocity distributions. The computed results indicate that including diffusion-induced transport affects the homogeneity of AD.

AM TEAM Oktrooiplein 1 Box 601 9000 Ghent Belgium

BIOMATH Department of Data Analysis and Mathematical Modelling Ghent University Coupure Links 653 B 9000 Ghent Belgium E mail

Department of Water Technology and Environmental Engineering University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Technicka 5 166 28 Prague 6 Czech Republic

Citace poskytuje Crossref.org