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Updated: Aug 12, 2025
A Novel Bioreactor for High Density Cultivation of Diverse Microbial Communities
Published on: December 25, 2015
Pore-scale lattice Boltzmann simulation of flow and mass transfer in bioreactor with an immobilized granule for
Qiang Liao1, Yan-Xia Yang2, Xun Zhu1
1Key Laboratory of Low-grade Energy Utilization Technologies and Systems, Chongqing University, Ministry of Education, Chongqing 400030, China; Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400030, China.
Abstract:
The photo bioreaction combined with flow and mass transfer is simulated with pore-scale lattice Boltzmann (LB) method, which is the scenario of a bioreactor filled with a porous granule immobilized photosynthetic bacteria cells for hydrogen production. The quartet structure generation set (QSGS) is used to generate porous structure of the immobilized granule. The effects of porosity of the immobilized granule on flow and concentration fields as well as the hydrogen production performance are investigated. Higher porosity facilitates the substrate solution smoothly flowing through the porous granule with increasing velocity, and thus results in higher product concentration inside the immobilized granule. Additionally, the substrate consumption efficiency increases, while hydrogen yield slightly decreases with increasing porosity, and they tend to stable for the porosity larger than 0.5. Furthermore, the LB numerical results have a good agreement with the experimental results. It is demonstrated that the pore-scale LB simulation method coupling with QSGS is available to simulate the photo hydrogen production in the bioreactor with porous immobilized granules.
