A CFD coupled photo-bioreactive transport modelling of tubular photobioreactor mixed by peristaltic pump

Optimisation and upscaling of biohydrogen production in externally pumped-recirculated photobioreac-tors (PBRs) are hampered by the infeasible computational cost of coupling hydrodynamics, to light trans-mission and bioreaction transport, through the column and peristaltic pump. This study approximates the complexities of peristaltic pump with inlet-outlet boundary conditions (BCs), introduces mean res-idence time (tm) for updating BCs, and unifies tm-dependent accelerated growth kinetics to parallelised Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) environment. Due to superior cost-savings compared to previous CFD studies, the bioprocess reliability under 5% coupled CFD-photo-bioreaction parameter uncertainties was investigated for the first time, and thoroughly validated with literature bioreaction data for a 1L PBR. The results agreed to within 10% of error for simulated velocities, identifying undesired regions with poor radial mixing, and showed similar output uncertainties between the coupled CFD-photo-bioreactions and pure photo-bioreactions models, indicating absence of numerical diffusion. Therefore, this approach has great potentials for modelling other similar biosystems.(c) 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.