| Abstract | biofilms growing in the soil pores lead to a reduction of hydraulic conductivity (bioclogging), which in return leads to a decrease in the supply of nutrients and thus reduced biofilm growth and -- in the context of bioremidiation -- possibly a reduction in purification performance. We introduce a macroscopic model for biofilm formation in porous media, such as soil, starting with the classic mesoscopic one-dimensional biofilm model extended by a recently introduced model for shear induced biomass detachment that explicitly relates biomass loss to the local hydrodynamics. For this purpose we couple the biofilm model with the stokes equations. Homogenization technique is used to upscale the model. We also introduce a new detachment rate expression. The resulting bioclogging model is qualitatively studied with elementary techniques. |
|---|
