Open-Source Anaerobic Digestion Modeling Platform, Anaerobic Digestion Model No. 1 Fast (ADM1F)

Area of Science:

• Environmental Engineering
• Biotechnology
• Computational Science

Background:

• Anaerobic digestion (AD) processes are crucial for waste management and renewable energy production.
• Accurate and efficient modeling is essential for optimizing AD systems.
• Existing models often face challenges with simulation speed and numerical stability.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce Anaerobic Digestion Model No. 1 Fast (ADM1F), an open-source platform for enhanced AD simulations.
• Improve simulation speed and numerical stability compared to existing ADM1 models.
• Demonstrate ADM1F's utility in analyzing complex AD scenarios.

Main Methods:

• Developed ADM1F using the Portable Extensive Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) for solving ADM1 equations.
• Integrated ADM1F with an iPython interface for user-friendly configuration, simulation, and analysis.
• Validated ADM1F performance against a benchmark ADM1 model in MATLAB.

Main Results:

• ADM1F achieves steady-state simulations over 99% faster than the benchmark, with outputs within 1% agreement.
• For dynamic simulations, ADM1F offers speed advantages with influent updates more frequent than every 4 hours.
• Two case studies demonstrated ADM1F's capability in analyzing co-digestion and digester recovery strategies.

Conclusions:

• ADM1F provides a significant advancement in simulating anaerobic digestion processes.
• The platform's speed and usability enable complex analyses in minutes.
• ADM1F is a valuable tool for researchers and engineers optimizing AD systems.