Case Study: University of Hohenheim achieves accurate biogas plant simulation with MathWorks Simulink and Simscape

Hohenheim University Simulates the Operation of a Biogas Plant with Simulink and Simscape

University of Hohenheim, Germany’s leading university in agricultural research and food sciences, needed a way to better understand and optimize biogas plant operations, including how different substrate mixtures and heat-distribution scenarios would affect energy output. The team already used MATLAB tools for biogas research and turned to MathWorks products, including Simulink and Simscape, to model these continuous processes more effectively.

MathWorks helped the university build a simulation flow model that calculates biogas production rates from substrate mixtures and predicts electrical and thermal output from the CHP system. The model can be tuned for different operating conditions such as substrate mix, controller settings, ambient temperature, pump flow rates, and number of consumers, enabling a wide range of scenarios to be simulated. Results were strong: the team could simulate annual energy output from different daily feeding strategies in just 15 minutes, and the simulations matched real data closely, with average errors not exceeding 7.7%.

University of Hohenheim

Anastasia Oskina

University of Hohenheim