BiRD: BioReactorDesign Gas-Liquid Flows for Biofuel Production
BioReactorDesign (BiRD) uses high-fidelity multiphase fluid dynamics simulations coupled with microbial bioreaction models for aerobic/anaerobic and gas fermentation pathways that generate fuels/chemicals from biomass-derived sugars and mixtures of energy-rich gas streams.
Gas and liquid phase transport, mass-transfer, and mixing physics at large length scales can significantly affect microbial conversion rates, particularly when the microbial reaction requires a narrow set of conditions. These phenomena are difficult to study in small-scale benchtop reactors that are typically well mixed. Predictive computational-fluid-dynamics-based simulations can therefore aid in the scale-up, design, and optimization of these reactors.
Simulations of 3,000-liter CO2/syngas bubble column reactor with a cylindrical sparger. (a) shows gas fraction, (b) CO2 concentration in the liquid, and (c) H2 concentration on liquid streamlines that indicate fluid mixing effects.
This model treats the gas and liquid as interpenetrating phases, which reduces the computational complexity of tracking individual gas bubbles that are several orders of magnitude smaller than reactor dimensions. This model also solves the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes multiphase equations that account for phase and chemical species transport, interphase mass and momentum transfer, and bubble size distributions and uses a phenomenological model for gas uptake by microbes.
BiRD includes a library of cases of typical bioreactors ready to be used with a variety of multiphysics and reaction models. The geometry and operating conditions of the reactors can be easily modified to allow for rapidly running multiple simulations, such as for optimizing the design of the reactor or for rapid prototyping to obtain proof of concept for a new reactor design.
Download BioReactorDesign Codes
The BiRD software suite can be accessed via a GitHub repository.
Publications
A Reacting Multiphase Computational Flow Model for 2,3-Butanediol Synthesis in Industrial-Scale Bioreactors, Chemical Engineering Research and Design (2023)
Impact of Variable Gas Mixtures on Bubble Size Distribution and Mass Transfer in Gas Fermentation Reactors, NLR Presentation (2022)
Computational Fluid Dynamics Study of Full-Scale Aerobic Bioreactors: Evaluation of Gas–Liquid Mass Transfer, Oxygen Uptake, and Dynamic Oxygen Distribution, Chemical Engineering Research and Design (2018)
Development Team
NLR's BiRD interface development team includes Hariswaran Sitaraman, Malik Hassanaly, and Mohammad Rahimi.
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Last Updated Feb. 3, 2026