3‐D spatio–temporal structures of biofilms in a water channel |
| |
| Authors: | Chen Chen Shuyu Hou Dacheng Ren Mingming Ren Qi Wang |
| |
| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Mathematics, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA;2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA;3. Beijing Computational Science Research Center, Beijing, China;4. School of Software, Nankai University, Tianjin, China;5. Department of Mathematics, Interdisciplinary Mathematics Institute, and NanoCenter, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA;6. School of Mathematics, Nankai University, Tianjin, China |
| |
| Abstract: | We develop a numerical predictive tool for multiphase fluid mixtures consisting of biofilms grown in a viscous fluid matrix by implementing a second‐order finite difference discretization of the multiphase biofilm model developed recently on a general purpose graphic processing unit. With this numerical tool, we study a 3‐D biomass–flow interaction resulting in biomass growth, structure formation, deformation, and detachment phenomena in biofilms grown in a water channel in quiescent state and subject to a shear flow condition, respectively. The numerical investigation is limited in the viscous regime of the biofilm–solvent mixture. In quiescent flows, the model predicts growth patterns consistent with experimental findings for single or multiple adjacent biofilm colonies, the so‐called mushroom shape growth pattern. The simulated biomass growth both in density and thickness matches very well with the experimentally grown biofilm in a water channel. When shear is imposed at a boundary, our numerical studies reproduce wavy patterns, pinching, and streaming phenomena observed in biofilms grown in a water channel. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
| |
| Keywords: | biofilms finite difference method hydrodynamics modeling 3‐D simulations |
|
|
