Numerical study of the air injection method into the flat-panel photobioreactor

article in a collection out of WoS and Scopus

English

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used to investigate the effect of a boundary condition on bubbly flow. The fluid domain is based on a section of a lab-scale photobioreactor where the gaseous phase is injected into the water. The paper presents two means of gaseous phase injection. The first method uses the mass-source term defined in a dedicated cell zone. The second approach follows the real-world setup where the air flows through the orifice modelled as a surface area on the aerator tube. Numerical results are analysed in terms of the equivalent diameter, bubble aspect ratio and specific dimensionless numbers. It was found that the size and shape of bubbles are independent of the boundary condition definition. However, the difference in the bubble rising velocity was observed. Furthermore, the position of the separation point and the size of the gaseous plume was found to be different among the studied cases.

Multiphase flow; VOF model; Bubbly flow; Boundary condition

REBEJ, M.; VONDÁL, J.; JEGLA, Z.

17. 6. 2021

Ottawa, Canada

978-1-927877-89-0

Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Momentum, Heat and Mass Transfer (MHMT 2021)

2371-5316

Proceedings of the World Congress on Momentum, Heat and Mass Transfer

Canada

305-1

305-8

8

https://avestia.com/MHMT2021_Proceedings/files/paper/ENFHT/ENFHT_305.pdf