Design and Fluid Simulation of a Fluidic Growth Chamber

Abstract: Filamentous fungi are of interest for biotechnologists particularly because of thefungi’s ability of producing commercial products after undergoing certain industrialprocess. Although because of the complicated and intricate internal mechanism ofthe fungi there are certain aspects which need to be studied to maximize the produc-tion output. A team at Chair of Measurement and Control Bioprocess Group at TUBerlin studies the internal behavior of the fungi when they are exposed to certainamount of wall shear stress (WSS) by performing small-scale experimentation. Forthis purpose a backward facing step (BFS) chamber is used.  This thesis work aims to perform Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysesto study the flow in the BFS chamber and to find appropriate locations to adherethe fungi spores on the chamber’s bottom wall. Commercially available CFD software Star CCM+ has been used for the CFD calcu-lations. The BFS chamber has been divided into two parts namely ’inflow channel’and ’step channel’ and simulations are performed separately. RANS model SST k-ωhas been used to simulate the flow in the inflow channel and Large Eddy Simulation(LES) model has been used in the step channel. The simulation result predicted that the streamwise WSS (WSS x ) is highest (≈ 8Pa) at the primary reattachment location downstream of the step. Due to reverseflow it is observed that WSS x is high (≈ 5 Pa) in the primary separation region.Standard deviation WSS x is highest (≈ 0.35 Pa) in the region around 28 x/h distancedownstream of the step on the bottom wall of the step channel and it is observedthat this is the region where the turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) is also maximumin the mean flow of the step channel. It is observed that there is small WSS x devi-ation in the primary reattachment region as well.                From the study it is concluded that the overall flow in the chamber is laminar withsome level of unsteadiness at few locations. To adhere the fungi spores on the bot-tom wall suitable location will be in the region where maximum variation in WSS xis observed. Keywords: Filamentous fungus, computational fluid dynamics, large eddy simula-tion, wall shear stress, backward facing step, turbulence kinetic energy