Influence of biofilms on transport properties in porous media

Abstract:

Microbial activity and biofilm growth in porous media can drastically modify transport properties such as permeability, longitudinal and transverse dispersion or effective reaction rates. Understanding these effects has proven to be a considerable challenge. Advances in this field have been hindered by the difficulty of modeling and visualizing these multi-phase non-linear effects across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. To address these issues, we are developing a strategy that combines imaging techniques based on x-ray micro-tomography with homogenization of pore-scale transport equations. Here, we review recent progress in x-ray imaging of biofilms in porous media, with a particular focus on the contrast agents that are used to differentiate between the fluid and biofilm phases. We further show how the 3D distribution of the different phases can be used to extract specific information about the biofilm and how effective properties can be calculated via the resolution of closure problems. These closure problems are obtained using the method of volume averaging and must be adapted to the problem of interest. In hydrological systems, we show that a generic formulation for reactive solute transport is based on a domain decomposition approach at the micro-scale yielding macro-scale models reminiscent of multi-rate mass transfer approaches.