A novel approach to the solution of a steady state biofilter model

Abstract

Designing of air pollution control equipment such as biofilters, also known as gas phase biological reactors, for elimination of toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from air streams require accurate modeling and model solutions. In this work, a novel approach is employed to solve a biofilter model and for performance predictions. The approach is based on expressing the particular solution of the governing equations as an integral containing Green’s function. The integral is then tuned to develop a suitable operator in which Krasnoselskii-Mann’s fixed point iteration method is applied. In this work, this technique was utilized to model the biological degradation of methanol and alpha-pinene. The results obtained by the proposed technique were compared against the experimental data adopted from literature and the originally published numerical solution. The comparison showed that the approach is highly accurate and converges fast with a uniformly distributed residual error over the entire domain. Furthermore, the method was used to perform a sensitivity analysis on the model equations to evaluate the performance of the biofilter under various conditions. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time Mann’s Green’s embedded method (MGEM) is applied in the solution of biofilter models.