Bacterial Growth and Bioremediation

Stephan Schumacher and Marian Slodicka

Paper presented at the workshop Scientific Computing in Chemical Engineering, March 2, 1995, Hamburg

Some species of bacteria are able to degrade organic contaminants like hydrocarbons. Two important situations we can think of are

• An aqueous suspension of bacteria infiltrates the ground where the pollutant remains immobile.
• Contaminated air streams through a wet porous filter containing the bacteria.

We consider the first situation with the following general assumptions:

• The contaminant is immobile.
• The contaminant is a nutrient in low concentrations while poisonous in higher concentrations.
• Bacteria are present in a mobile (aqueous) and immobile (absorbed) phase.
• The flow field for the water is temporally and spatially constant.

Precisely, we consider the following set of model equations (UVC) :

The sequence of pictures below shows the concentrations of mobile (U) and immobile (V) bacteria and the pollutant (C) at the instants 0, 60, 120, 130 and 180 minutes (each of the files is ~30 Kb GIF):

U0, U60, U120, U130, U180

V0, V60, V120, V130, V180

C0, C60, C120, C130, C180