151. A Multiple-Relaxation-Time Lattice-Boltzmann Model for Bacterial Chemotaxis: Effects of Initial Concentration, Diffusion, and Hydrodynamic Dispersion on Traveling Bacterial Bands
- Author
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Zhifeng Yan and Markus Hilpert
- Subjects
Materials science ,General Mathematics ,Immunology ,Lattice Boltzmann methods ,Bacterial Physiological Phenomena ,Models, Biological ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology ,Quantitative Biology::Cell Behavior ,Microbiology ,Diffusion ,Quantitative Biology::Subcellular Processes ,Dispersion (optics) ,Computer Simulation ,Diffusion (business) ,General Environmental Science ,Pharmacology ,Chemotaxis ,General Neuroscience ,Mathematical Concepts ,Biodegradation, Environmental ,Computational Theory and Mathematics ,Flow velocity ,Chemical physics ,Hydrodynamics ,Potential flow ,General Agricultural and Biological Sciences ,Porous medium ,Shear flow ,Porosity - Abstract
Bacterial chemotaxis can enhance the bioremediation of contaminants in aqueous and subsurface environments if the contaminant is a chemoattractant that the bacteria degrade. The process can be promoted by traveling bands of chemotactic bacteria that form due to metabolism-generated gradients in chemoattractant concentration. We developed a multiple-relaxation-time (MRT) lattice-Boltzmann method (LBM) to model chemotaxis, because LBMs are well suited to model reactive transport in the complex geometries that are typical for subsurface porous media. This MRT-LBM can attain a better numerical stability than its corresponding single-relaxation-time LBM. We performed simulations to investigate the effects of substrate diffusion, initial bacterial concentration, and hydrodynamic dispersion on the formation, shape, and propagation of bacterial bands. Band formation requires a sufficiently high initial number of bacteria and a small substrate diffusion coefficient. Uniform flow does not affect the bands while shear flow does. Bacterial bands can move both upstream and downstream when the flow velocity is small. However, the bands disappear once the velocity becomes too large due to hydrodynamic dispersion. Generally bands can only be observed if the dimensionless ratio between the chemotactic sensitivity coefficient and the effective diffusion coefficient of the bacteria exceeds a critical value, that is, when the biased movement due to chemotaxis overcomes the diffusion-like movement due to the random motility and hydrodynamic dispersion.
- Published
- 2014