F. L. Caneppele

Numerical methods to biosystems and food engineering students: Hands-on practices and cross-disciplinary integration

While virtualization has supported many engineering sectors, it remains underexplored in agroindustrial engineering. Accordingly, hands‐on activities in numerical methods have been proposed to food and biosystems engineering students at a didactic computational laboratory. As those learning‐by‐doing tasks refer to agroindustrial problems, integration with forthcoming disciplines has been achieved and pedagogical ethos has indeed been promoted.

Development of in-house lattice-Boltzmann simulator of bioreactors for wastewater treatment: basic concepts and initial results

While computational modelling has increasingly supported wastewater bioreactor engineering, novel numerical techniques have been developed such as the lattice-Boltzmann method (LBM). With vinasse treatment as case study, this work is a first step towards a comprehensive LBM simulator of a continuous-flow anaerobic packed-bed reactor. Extensions from typical models comprise one-dimensional (besides time) dependence, species transport via convection and diffusion, and imposition of either Dirichlet or Danckwerts condition at inlet. The LBM simulator proved to be operational when simulating the bioreactor at different hydraulic retention times (HRTs). Simulated profiles show that stepwise feeding concentrations are smoothed as they are transported towards the bioreactor exit while concentrations increase or decrease in response to generation or degradation kinetics. Good fitting was observed for concentrations of acetic acid (2.1 kg-COD/m3 for HRT = 24 h) and butyric acid (1.3 kg-COD/m3 for HRT = 16 h) at the exit whereas other concentrations were numerically simulated at proper order of magnitude.

Development of an in-House Lattice-Boltzmann Simulator Towards Bioreactors for Wastewater Treatment: Underlying Concepts

Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has become a powerful technique to simulate bioprocesses in porous media. Based on a relatively simple dynamic 1-D model, the present work is a first step towards a comprehensive LBM simulator of bioreactor for vinasse treatment, taken as case study. Species concentrations were LBM-simulated at appropriate order of magnitude.

Lattice Boltzmann Simulation of Transport Phenomena in Food and Bioprocesses: Fundamentals and Applications

As part of ongoing research on computational modelling of agroindustrial biosystems, lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) have been applied in order to numerically simulate transport phenomena in food and bioprocesses. This paper addresses LBM simulation of two different continuousflow processes in fixed-bed equipment whose models are quite similar, namely bioaffinity chromatography and extraction of biocompounds. Considering a dynamic onedimensional model framework for those processes, LBM was implemented in D1Q2 lattice and particle distribution functions were assigned to species (adsorbate or extract) concentrations in both fluid and solid phases. Equilibrium distribution functions were set by considering diffusiveconvective transport in the fluid phase whereas the solid phase remains stationary. LBM simulations were carried out in view of existing research work on bioseparation of lysozyme and extraction of essential oil from gorse. As the governing equation for species concentration in the solid phase lacked partial derivatives with respect to the spatial coordinate, the corresponding streaming step was suppressed in the LBM code. No loss of functionality was verified and the expected shapes of breakthrough as well as extraction yield curves were suitably reproduced in all LBM simulations.