Advancing biohydrogen production through indirect photolysis: Insights from numerical simulation using the lattice boltzmann method

Abstract

Hydrogen production through biochemical reactions is regarded as one of the most potential alternative technologies for producing hydrogen because of its efficacy, renewability, and environmental friendliness. Indirect biophotolysis is one of the most potential biohydrogen production technologies. In this study, a platform based on a coupled lattice Boltzmann method with cellular automata (LBM-CA) was developed to investigate the effects of different illumination intensities and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations on indirect photolysis in a bioreactor. The bioreactor was divided into two distinct parts. The first part as a photobioreactor had a transparent window at the top wall of the bioreactor that allowed solar illumination to enter the domain to generate glucose through the conversion of CO2 to carbohydrates (such as glucose) while the second was opaque where hydrogen was produced from carbohydrates by microorganisms. The results show that in the first part of the bioreactor, biofilm grew once CO2 was available. However, there is a lag in the biofilm growthand biohydrogen production between the first and the second part of the bioreactor because they depend on glucose production in the first part. The biofilm concentration increased as illumination increased, especially in the early stages, while the biofilm growth mainly occurred in the first part of the bioreactor. Increasing illumination could increase biofilm concentration by 92.4 % and reduce the lag time. It is also observed that increasing CO2 concentration changed the normalized biofilm concentration considerably, from − 40.9 % to 18.8 %. This can be attributed to increased nutrient availability for microorganism growth and glucose production in the first part of biophotolysis, resulting in greater concentrations of glucose as the main nutrient in the next part. Changing the inlet concentration leads to variations in the normalized hydrogen concentration in the range of − 72.9 % to 49.5 %.