Development of a compartment model based on CFD simulations for mixing description in bioreactors

Understanding and modelling the complex interactions between biological reaction and hydrodynamics is a key problem when dealing with bioprocesses. It is fundamental to be able to accurately predict the hydrodynamics behaviour of bioreactors of different size and its interaction with the biological reaction. CFD can provide detailed modelling about hydrodynamics and mixing. However, it is computationally intensive, especially when reactions are taken into account. Another way to predict hydrodynamics is the use of "Compartment" or "Multi-zone" model which are much less demanding in computation time than CFD. However, compartments and fluxes between them are often defined by considering global quantities not representative of the flow. To overcome the limitations of these two methods, a solution is to combine compartment modelling and CFD simulations. Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a methodology in order to propose a compartment model based on CFD simulations of a bioreactor. The flow rate between two compartments can be easily computed from the velocity fields obtained by CFD. The difficulty lies in the definition of the zones in such a way they can be considered as perfectly mixed. The creation of the model compartments from CFD cells can be achieved manually or automatically. The manual zoning consists in aggregating CFD cells according to the user's wish. The automatic zoning defines compartments as regions within which the value of one or several properties are uniform with respect to a given tolerance. Both manual and automatic zoning methods have been developed and compared by simulating the mixing of an inert scalar. For the automatic zoning, several algorithms and different flow properties have been tested as criteria for the compartment creation.