Scaling the fractional advective–dispersive equation for numerical evaluation of microbial dynamics in confined geometries with sticky boundaries

Abstract

Microbial motility is often characterized by ‘run and tumble’ behavior which consists of bacteria making sequences of runs followed by tumbles (random changes in direction). As a superset of Brownian motion, Levy motion seems to describe such a motility pattern. The Eulerian (Fokker–Planck) equation describing these motions is similar to the classical advection–diffusion equation except that the order of highest derivative is fractional, α ∈ (0, 2]. The Lagrangian equation, driven by a Levy measure with drift, is stochastic and employed to numerically explore the dynamics of microbes in a flow cell with sticky boundaries. The Eulerian equation is used to non-dimensionalize parameters. The amount of sorbed time on the boundaries is modeled as a random variable that can vary over a wide range of values. Salient features of first passage time are studied with respect to scaled parameters.