Media-prep + Monod fermenter — a NRTL process flowsheet
A production bioprocess step: the growth medium is preheated to fermentation temperature, then a Monod chemostat consumes the substrate to build biomass — the media conditioning + fermentation train around the reactor.
168 views 0 forks
- Rigorous NRTL thermodynamics, solved by the same engine every simulation runs on.
- 2 unit operations modeled: Preheat, FERM.
- Focus areas: Fermentation, Media conditioning, Monod kinetics.
- Thermodynamics
- NRTL
- Components
- ethanol, water
- Unit operations
- PreheatFERM
Opens in a new tab, loaded straight into the app — no setup.
Read the step-by-step guideReproduce this exact result from Python — the real client.get_example() → run_and_wait() path, not a mockup.
from flowsim.sdk import FlowSimClient
client = FlowSimClient()
example = client.get_example("fermenter-train")
sim = client.create_simulation(example["title"], example["flowsheet"])
result = client.run_and_wait(sim["id"])
print(result["status"]) # "converged"
streams = client.streams(sim["id"])Related models
Bioreactor (Monod fermenter)
A steady-state chemostat: substrate is consumed by Monod growth (μ = μmax·S/(Ks + S)) to produce biomass — a modern reactor model legacy tools lack.
Lignocellulosic ethanol — pretreatment + enzymatic hydrolysis + real fermentation
The bioresource-engineering gap this closes: two existing 'corn-ethanol' showcases in this catalog (superheated-steam-drying-loop, bioethanol-mvr-stillage) are both downstream-only — drying and distillation on an already-fermented feed or a generic surrogate solid, with no bioreactor anywhere in either flowsheet. This is the first biofuel showcase that actually runs a real fermentation: pretreatment (dilute-acid/steam) solubilizes part of the lignocellulosic feed into fermentable sugars, the existing generic enzymatic_reactor (Michaelis-Menten) saccharifies the cellulose fraction left behind, and the existing bioreactor (Monod chemostat) ferments the resulting sugar to ethanol — the real kinetics kernel, not a spec-based separator standing in for the biology. Bounded, and stated plainly: the pretreatment conversion fraction (hemicellulose → sugar) is a caller-specified design input — a measured/vendor yield, not a predicted dilute-acid severity-factor (log R0) correlation; inventing one would fabricate exactly the number this flowsheet's answer depends on. Real lignocellulose chemistry (cellulose, hemicellulose, xylose, glucose) carries no enthalpy or density data anywhere in MaximaLabs's thermo databank — every sugar was checked directly and none has a liquid-density or ideal-gas-Cp correlation, so a flowsheet naming them by their real identities cannot solve at all. Real, differently-named organics with full databank coverage stand in 1:1 instead (glycerol for the lignocellulosic solid, acetic acid for the hemicellulose-derived sugar liquor, methanol for glucose) — the same generic-surrogate posture already established elsewhere in MaximaLabs (e.g. ethanol standing in as the dissolved substrate in the perfusion-bioreactor tests). Ethanol itself is the one real target molecule in the chain — no surrogate needed. Kinetic constants (mu_max, Vmax, Km, yields) are illustrative, not fit to a published fermentation study — the same posture the LHHW methanol-synthesis showcase states for its own rate law. The pentose-sugar liquor from pretreatment is not fermented in this showcase (many industrial processes do not ferment it with ordinary yeast either) — it reports to its own product stream rather than being silently discarded. No downstream distillation is attempted: a rigorous VLE column needs every component priceable, and the fermentation broth carries an unpriced 'biomass' pseudo-component (the same class of limitation this session's Gibbs-reactor work hit with elemental carbon) — ethanol recovery is the documented next real step, not modeled here.
Substrate-inhibited fermenter (Haldane kinetics)
A continuous chemostat where growth is genuinely inhibited at high substrate concentration — the real Haldane mechanism (mu = mu_max*S/(Ks + S + S^2/Ki)), a native solver kinetics option (params['ki']), not a decorative custom block (custom_block structurally can't change stream composition, so faking this through one would misrepresent the reactor's actual material balance). At the same dilution rate a plain Monod fermenter would consume nearly all the feed substrate; here more substrate survives unconverted and less biomass forms, because growth is suppressed in this concentration range — the whole point of modeling inhibition at all. A strongly inhibitory Ki can also make a nominally achievable dilution rate (D < mu_max) physically unreachable and the reactor washes out, since the Haldane mu(S) curve peaks at a finite S and falls again at higher S.
Precision fermentation (alternative protein)
A continuous chemostat runs Monod growth kinetics with a nonzero product yield — biomass growth and a secreted target protein, the reactor model precision-fermentation/cellular-agriculture scale-up runs on, not just the biomass-only chemostat the other bioreactor examples show.
Chiral API purification: continuous SMB chromatography
A racemic active pharmaceutical ingredient (R/S enantiomers, dilute in ethanol eluent) is resolved continuously by simulated moving bed chromatography — the workhorse of chiral-drug manufacture that legacy steady-state flowsheet simulators have no native model for (engineers script it in MATLAB). This uses the native SMB unit op, which solves the standard steady-state True Moving Bed equivalent: a 4-zone counter-current equilibrium-stage cascade whose zone flow-rate ratios sit inside the triangle-theory separation region, so the more-retained enantiomer reports to the extract and the other to the raffinate — the separation is driven by the chiral adsorption selectivity (the two enantiomers are otherwise thermodynamically identical).
Superheated-steam drying loop with MVR heat recovery
A wet cake is dried in a superheated-steam dryer (steam as the drying medium instead of hot air), and the evaporated moisture — pure steam — is recovered by mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) plus a trim superheater into high-grade superheated steam that reheats the recirculating drying medium. Superheated-steam drying is the energy-efficient route for biofuel and food solids (distillers' grains, beet pulp, lignite): because the drying atmosphere is steam, the evaporated water leaves as more steam whose latent heat is recompressed and reused, instead of being lost in a humid exhaust.