Numerical simulation of membrane bioreactor (MBR)

Abstract

The Final Year Project being undertaken by the student is titled Numerical Simulation of Membrane Bioreactor (MBR). The simulation is designated to be carried out using an open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, Open Field Operation and Manipulation (OpenFOAM). The project aims to study and model MBR to predict the hydrodynamic characteristics and to enable comparison to be made with an ongoing MBR experiment in order to validate the degree of accuracy of the simulation.The student commenced the simulation by simplifying the MBR model as a simple bubble column with air injected from the bottom of the open column filled with still water. A suitable two-phase solver, twoPhaseEulerFoam is chosen as it is based on the Euler-Euler twofluid methodology with the integration of a two-equation κ-ε turbulence model to model the large-scale vortical flow in the continuous phase. Two types of geometry have been generated, being two-dimensional double rectangle column and three-dimensional cylindrical column. An example of two-dimensional rectangular domain that is available in the OpenFOAM tutorial is also being run for comparison purpose.