A Study on Selection of the Biofilm for the Hybrid Up-Flow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (HUASB) Reactor Using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Analysis

Abstract

At this present scenario, treating the industrial and domestic wastewater in economical and time-consuming manner is the biggest challenge to the scientists. In aerobic treatment, the power consumption rate and land area requirement are very high compared to the anaerobic treatment. Because of these disadvantages, industries are moving to anaerobic treatment plant. In this kind of treatment plants, the efficiency of the treatment is high and recovery of biogas is also possible which is cost-effective too. Due to these advantages, the Hybrid Up-flow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (HUASB) Reactor plays a significant role among various high rate anaerobic reactor. The main problem in the HUASB Reactor is clogging in the biofilm portion. The reasons behind this problem were addressed as suspended solid attachment in the biofilm and lacks of solid–liquid movement. To resolve this issue, no computational studies have been done till date. To address this issue, various biofilm designs have been developed with respect to the various structures and different surface areas. In this study, the laboratory-scale HUASB Reactor was designed with respect to different biofilm model and it has been operated to visualize the fluid flow interactions inside the reactor with respect to the velocity, pressure, turbulence flow, density and shear stress. Depending on these physical parameters, optimum biofilm was chosen with the help of CFD analysis. This could be implemented to develop the industrial-scale reactor for better performance to avoid the practical difficulties.