Design and analysis of flow velocity distribution inside a raceway pond using computational fluid dynamics

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• 作者：Ramakant Pandey ; M. Premalatha
• 关键词：Raceway pond ; Microalgae ; Mixing study ; Turbulence modeling ; Multiphase modeling
• 刊名：Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：March 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：40
• 期：3
• 页码：439-450
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Chemistry and Materials Science
• 刊物主题：Biotechnology; Industrial and Production Engineering; Environmental Engineering/Biotechnology; Industrial Chemistry/Chemical Engineering; Food Science;
• 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• ISSN：1615-7605
• 卷排序：40

文摘

Open raceway ponds are widely adopted for cultivating microalgae on a large scale. Working depth of the raceway pond is the major component to be analysed for increasing the volume to surface area ratio. The working depth is limited up to 5–15 cm in conventional ponds but in this analysis working depth of raceway pond is considered as 25 cm. In this work, positioning of the paddle wheel is analysed and corresponding Vertical Mixing Index are calculated using CFD. Flow pattern along the length of the raceway pond, at three different paddle wheel speeds are analysed for L/W ratio of 6, 8 and 10, respectively. Effect of clearance (C) between rotor blade tip and bottom surface is also analysed by taking four clearance conditions i.e. C = 2, 5, 10 and 15. Moving reference frame method of Fluent is used for the modeling of six blade paddle wheel and realizable k–ε model is used for capturing turbulence characteristics. Overall objective of this work is to analyse the required geometry for maintaining a minimum flow velocity to avoid settling of algae corresponding to 25 cm working depth. Geometry given in [13] is designed using ANSYS Design modular and CFD results are generated using ANSYS FLUENT for the purpose of validation. Good agreement of results is observed between CFD and experimental Particle image velocimetry results with the deviation of 7.23%.