Abstract
Biofilms are a complex and heterogeneous aggregation of multiple populations of microorganisms linked together by their excretion of extracellular polymer substances (EPS). Biofilms can cause many serious problems, such as chronic infections, food contamination and equipment corrosion, although they can be useful for constructive purposes, such as in wastewater treatment, heavy metal removal from hazardous waste sites, biofuel production, power generation through microbial fuel cells and microbially enhanced oil recovery; however, biofilm formation and growth are complex due to interactions among physicochemical and biological processes under operational and environmental conditions. Advanced numerical modeling techniques using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) are enabling the prediction of biofilm formation and growth and microbial community structures. This study is the first attempt to perform a general review on major contributions to LBM-based biofilm models, ranging from pioneering efforts to more recent progress. We present our understanding of the modeling of biofilm formation, growth and detachment using LBM-based models and present the fundamental aspects of various LBM-based biofilm models. We describe how the LBM couples with cellular automata (CA) and individual-based model (IbM) approaches and discuss their applications in assessing the spatiotemporal distribution of biofilms and their associated parameters and evaluating bioconversion efficiency. Finally, we discuss the main features and drawbacks of LBM-based biofilm models from ecological and biotechnological perspectives and identify current knowledge gaps and future research priorities.
Highlights
Bacteria mainly live together, forming complex and heterogeneous aggregations of structured communities connected together by their excretion of extracellular polymer substances (EPS)
Duedynamic to the highly heterogeneous biofilm and biofilters ofwithin wastewater treatment to the highly growth porous media, this can cause a decrease of Due pore space, leading to a reduction heterogeneous biofilmand growth within porous media, this can cause a decrease of pore in porosity permeability of the system and increasing hydrodynamic depression
We revisit a family of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM)-based biofilm models chronologically
Summary
Bacteria mainly live together, forming complex and heterogeneous aggregations of structured communities connected together by their excretion of extracellular polymer substances (EPS). Such aggregates of microorganisms are called biofilms. Due to the very complex interactions among physicochemical and biological processes, direct measurement of the impacts of bioactivity on transport dynamics in 3D structures is very difficult due to sample opacity [25,26]; many numerical models have been developed to examine biofilm growth, which can be categorized into discrete or particle-based models and continuum models [27,28]
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