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Review
. 2025 Jan 10;11(2):e41911.
doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2025.e41911. eCollection 2025 Jan 30.

CFD modelling and simulation of anaerobic digestion reactors for energy generation from organic wastes: A comprehensive review

Muhammad Usman Farid  1   2 , Indiana A Olbert  2 , Andreas Bück  1 , Abdul Ghafoor  3 , Guangxue Wu  2
Affiliations
Review

CFD modelling and simulation of anaerobic digestion reactors for energy generation from organic wastes: A comprehensive review

Muhammad Usman Farid et al. Heliyon. .

Abstract

Anaerobic digestion (AD) has been recognized as one of the most viable options for the treatment of a wide range of waste materials. Complex structure of wastes is safely broken down to destroy pollutants and pathogens. Biogas is produced as a by-product of this process which is considered as a clean energy resource. However, provision of controlled environment for microbial activities is critical to ensure the required process efficiency. This can only be achieved with the efficient design of controlled vessels used for anaerobic digestion, termed as AD reactors. AD functions such as mixing, hydrodynamics, multiphase interaction, heat transfer, temperature distribution and bio kinetics are significantly affected by the reactor shape, design and configurations, hence making it essential to optimize the reactor design before installation at large scale. Mostly, such optimization is carried out with the help of lab scale experimentations and testing protocols which result in high costs for repeating several design experiments. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an applied mathematical tool which helps to understand and predict the fluid dynamics, heat flow as well as species transport in different domains. This approach contributes to minimize the experimental costs while optimizing the reactor configurations in less time. The current review is presented to summarize and discuss the core characteristics of AD process followed by concerned CFD attributes. Research gaps and critical challenges are identified in different aspects such as reactor design, and configuration, mixing, multiphase flow, heat transfer, biokinetics as well as machine learning approaches.

Keywords: Anaerobic digestion; CFD; Hydrodynamics; Multiphase; Reactor design.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Application and benefits of AD process [8].
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Industrial scale AD (biogas) plants [10].
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Bibliometric analysis of CFD simulation of AD process (web of Science®).
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Components of a typical AD reactor.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Core characteristics of AD process.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Different mixing strategies (a) mechanical mixing (b) gas recirculation (c) liquid internal recirculation [18,37,40,42,43].
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
CFD modelling attributes for AD process.
Fig. 8
Fig. 8
Design Optimization of AD Reactor using CFD Approach.
Fig. 9
Fig. 9
Eulerian and Lagrangian approaches in CFD modelling of AD process [16,89].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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