Jože Panjan

Addressing case specific biogas plant tasks: Industry oriented methane yields derived from 5 L Automatic Methane Potential Test Systems in batch or semi-continuous tests using realistic inocula, substrate particle sizes and organic loading

The primary aim of the study was to develop and validate an in-house upscale of Automatic Methane Potential Test System II for studying real-time inocula and real-scale substrates in batch, codigestion and enzyme enhanced hydrolysis experiments, in addition to semi-continuous operation of the developed equipment and experiments testing inoculum functional quality. The successful upscale to 5L enabled comparison of different process configurations in shorter preparation times with acceptable accuracy and high-through put intended for industrial decision making. The adoption of the same scales, equipment and methodologies in batch and semi-continuous tests mirroring those at full scale biogas plants resulted in matching methane yields between the two laboratory tests and full-scale, confirming thus the increased decision making value of the approach for industrial operations.

Large-scale oil spill simulation using the lattice Boltzmann method, validation on the Lebanon oil spill case.

This paper tests the adequacy of using the lattice Boltzmann method in large-scale oil spill modelling, such as the Lebanon oil spill. Several numerical experiments were performed in order to select the most appropriate lattice and to decide between the single- and two-relaxation time models. Large-scale oil spills require simulations with short computational times. In order to speed up the computation and preserve adequate accuracy of the model, five different flux limiting interpolation techniques were compared and evaluated. The model was validated on the Lebanon oil spill with regard to the oil-slick position and concentrations in the sea, and the beaching area on the coast. Good agreement with satellite images of the slick and field data on beaching was achieved. The main advantages of the applied method are the capability of simulating very low oil concentrations and computational times that are by an order of magnitude shorter compared to similar models.