Numerical and Experimental Study of Raceway Pond For Production of Microalgea in Tunisia

Abstract

The objective of this work is to enhance the production of microalgae under better conditions from microalgae production units. The system studied is a raceway pond constructed in the city of Monastir in Tunisia. Using the commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent, a series of simulations were developed to validate the hydrodynamic characteristics of the pond. The results were validated by experimental measurements of the fluid velocity in both channels of the system. The standard turbulence model k-ɛ was used to model the turbulence created by the impeller of the fluid flow. The meshing effect was used to reduce the computation time of the simulation. The effect of the velocity inlet and the position of the paddle wheel in the fluid channels on the system behavior was examined .The effect of the inlet velocity and the position of the paddle wheel in the fluid channels on the system behaviour was investigated. The numerical results show good agreement with the experimental measurements. In fact, the error between the numerical and the experimental results is recorded acceptable and is small than 6.38%.