Alexandru A. Vasile

Bioreactors are a controlled environment used for controlling the growth of cells and microorganisms. They are extensively used in wastewater treatment, food processing, and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. Due to their complex nature, bioreactor experiments do not provide as much information as is required, thus computation fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations are used. Unfortunately, transient CFD simulations of such reactors are prohibitively resource intensive, thus reduced order models are needed. A common choice is a compartment model, unfortunately, the implementations available in literature suffer from a variety of problems and unjustified assumptions.

The overall goal of the proposed research is to create and validate a high fidelity topology-based compartment model for multiphase bioreactors and demonstrate its applicability to the design and optimisation of the reactor geometry and its control scheme. The approach will build upon work done by a past graduate student, Thomas Donnelly. It will be expanded to look at non-local information for classifying each location in space based on its flow topology. The classification will be used to group similar regions into compartments and to inform the creation of the reduced order model inside each region.

Current progress includes the implementation of controller support into OpenCMP, the translating the existing topology based compartmentalisation technique into python (for use in OpenCMP) and applying it to results from the finite element method, as it was originally designed for the finite volume method. Currently underway is the designing, meshing, and simulating the several test cases to be used in the development and validation of the new compartmentalisation scheme.

• Computation Fluid Dynamics
• Python software development

• 2020, Masters of Applied Science (MASc), Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo
• 2018, Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc), Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo