Numerical simulation of multi-species biofilms in porous media for different kinetics

Abstract

There are bacteria that can form strong biofilms in porous media. These biofilms can be used as biobarriers to restrict the flow of pollutants. For certain contaminants, a second species of bacteria that can actually react with the contaminants can be added to the biobarrier to actually degrade the pollutants. We propose some mathematical models for the formation of these reacting biobarriers under different hypotheses, and numerically solve the resulting equations for the flow, transport and reactions. Qualitative comparisons with some experimental results are also given.