Zahra Nourizad - School of Chemical Engineering, University College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, Iranian Research Institute of Petroleum Industry, Tehran, Iran
Mohammad Reza Mehrnia - School of Chemical Engineering, University College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, Iranian Research Institute of Petroleum Industry, Tehran, Iran
Mohammad Irani - School of Chemical Engineering, University College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, Iranian Research Institute of Petroleum Industry, Tehran, Iran

The hydrodynamics of an internal loop airlift bioreactor was investigated using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model with Eulerian description of the gas and liquid phases. The turbulent in the liquid phase was described using the k-ε model. The reactor operated with pure kerosene and diesel and 10% water in diesel microemulsion. Gas holdup were predicted for different superficial gas velocities and compared with experimental data. For comparison, simulation was also done with distilled water. The εg values of kerosene and diesel system were in most cases higher than the water system. Increase in the viscosity of the petroleum system resulted in decrease in the values of εg. The CFD model showed a good agreement with the experiment.

Airlift bioreactor, Gas hold-up, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Hydrodynamics, Petroleum