Seminar Salih Ouchtout

Abstract

Waste management and renewable energy generation are two key issues in nowadays society. A major research field arising in recent years focuses on combining the two aforementioned topics by developing new techniques to handle waste and to use it in energy production. The anaerobic digestion process is a natural biological process of decomposition of organic matter by microorganisms (bacteria) activated in the absence of oxygen. It consists of complex chemical reactions. In the long term, the organic matter is transformed into “biogas” which is a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide. In this work, we present and study a coupled model combining the biological and the mechanical aspects describing respectively the process of the biogas production and the fluid flow (one-phase and two-phase flow) during the anaerobic biodegradation of the organic matter in a landfill considered as a reactive porous medium. We carry out the full-discretization of the PDEs problem by using the second order BDF2 scheme in time and the mixed finite element method in a variational framework. The numerical simulations in 2D and 3D will be given.