CFD Modelling of Bioreactors

Membrane bioreactor has emerged as one of the leading technologies for treating municipal and industrial wastewater due to its efficiency in producing high-quality effluents. One of the significant challenges in bioreactors is the high energy and operating costs. The diffused aeration process of a bioreactor is the most energy-intensive operation amounting to 45-75% of the plant energy costs. This works attempts to optimize the wastewater treatment process in a bioreactor through modeling and experimental studies. The overall aim is to develop efficient models which can be used to reduce the treatment costs of the wastewater treatment process while increasing the treatment efficiency. This work has demonstrated that the numerical models can be successfully used to optimize the treatment efficiency while reducing the capital (membrane replacement) costs and operating (aeration) costs of a bioreactor. The time and efforts required for identifying the optimum conditions through numerical modelling are significantly less than physically characterizing the bioreactor (and varying the conditions to optimize them).