Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Computational Simulation Of Mass Transport And Energy Transfer In The Microbial Fuel Cell System, Shiqi Ou

Doctoral Dissertations

This doctoral dissertation introduces the research in the computational modeling and simulation for the microbial fuel cell (MFC) system which is a bio-electrochemical system that drives a current by using bacteria and mimicking bacterial interactions found in nature. The numerical methods, research approaches and simulation comparison with the experiments in the microbial fuel cells are described; the analysis and evaluation for the model methods and results that I have achieved are presented in this dissertation.

The development of the renewable energy has been a hot topic, and scientists have been focusing on the microbial fuel cell, which is an environmentally-friendly …

An Application Of Path-Percolation Theory And Lattice-Boltzmann Model On Mass Transfer In Inhomogeneous Porous Media, Ozgur Cekmer

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, random inhomogeneous porous channels were generated statistically, and single- and multi-phase flow models were developed to investigate diffusion behavior of gases in porous media. Three different methods were used to simulate inhomogeneous porous flow channels. First, the path-percolation theory was adapted in diffusion studies to generate random high-tortuosity (above 1.07) porous channels with a desired porosity within a specified confidence level. Cluster labeling process was applied to simulate paths for the gas molecules, and the resulting effective porosity was investigated statistically. Second, the double-path-percolation theory was introduced to simulate low-tortuosity (between 1.0005 and 1.0700) flow channels. Using …