Air driven bioreactors for power to gas conversion

Description

Power-to-gas aims to provide technologies for the energy future that are capable of storing renewable energies in the gas grid cost-effectively and efficiently for a longer period of time, while at the same time driving a transition to a climate-neutral gas grid. In addition to catalytic methanation, the focus is shifting to biological methanation using archaea. In this process, methanation takes place at comparatively low temperatures of 50 to 60°C. The frequently used stirred tank is well researched, but has severe downsides, like additional energy input due to a stirrer and limited gas throughputs. In bubble columns, on the other hand, mixing of the archaea takes place due to the resulting hydrodynamics. In principle, no additional energy input due to an agitator is necessary. However, the design is only rudimentarily discussed in the literature. A large number of open questions must be answered in order to advance an efficient and economical design of the columns e.g. in regard to optimum bubble size, interactions between hydrodynamics, and the archaea, nutrition supply, and flexible operation conditions. This contribution highlights the current design concepts and gives an insight into own recent studies on biological methanation regarding hydrodynamics and bubble size of columns and loop reactors between DN100 and DN300. Bubble size, hold-up and fluid hydrodynamics were measured using beyond others optical probes and machine learning.

Period	04 Sept 2024
Event title	GLS-16 International Conference on Gas-Liquid and Gas-Liquid-Solid Reactor Engineering
Event type	Conference
Location	GermanyShow on map