Partial integration of ADM1 into CFD: Understanding the impact of diffusion on anaerobic digestion mixing

Abstract

Sufficient mixing is crucial for the proper performance of anaerobic digestion (AD), creating a homogeneous distribution of soluble substrates, biomass, pH, and temperature. The opaqueness of the sludge and mode of operation make it challenging to study AD mixing experimentally. Therefore, hydrodynamics modelling employing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is often used to investigate this mixing. However, CFD models mostly do not include biochemical reactions and, hence, ignore the effect of diffusion-induced transport on AD heterogeneity. The novelty of this work is the partial integration of Anaerobic Digestion Model no. 1 (ADM1) into the CFD model. The aim is to better understand the effect of advection-diffusion transport on the homogenization of soluble substrates and biomass. Furthermore, AD homogeneity analysis in terms of concentration distribution is proposed rather than the traditional velocity distributions. The computed results indicate that including diffusion-induced transport affects the homogeneity of AD.