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We present an experimental study combining particle tracking, active microrheology, and differential dynamic microscopy (DDM) to investigate the dynamics and rheology of an oil–water interface during biofilm formation by the bacteria Pseudomonas Aeruginosa PA14. The interface transitions from an active fluid dominated by the swimming motion of adsorbed bacteria at early age to an active viscoelastic system at late ages when the biofilm is established. The microrheology measurements using microscale magnetic rods indicate that the biofilm behaves as a viscoelastic solid at late age. The bacteria motility at the interface during the biofilm formation, which is characterized in the DDM measurements, evolves from diffusive motion at early age to constrained, quasi-localized motion at later age. Similarly, the mobility of passively moving colloidal spheres at the interface decreases significantly with increasing interface age and shows a dependence on sphere size after biofilm formation that is orders-of-magnitude larger than that expected in a homogeneous system in equilibrium. We attribute this anomalous size dependence to either length-scale-dependent rheology of the biofilm or widely differing effects of the bacteria activity on the motion of spheres of different sizes.
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Numerical analysis of a parabolic variational inequality system modeling biofilm growth at the porescale
Abstract In this article, we consider a system of two coupled nonlinear diffusion–reaction partial differential equations (PDEs) which model the growth of biofilm and consumption of the nutrient. At the scale of interest the biofilm density is subject to a pointwise constraint, thus the biofilm PDE is framed as a parabolic variational inequality. We derive rigorous error estimates for a finite element approximation to the coupled nonlinear system and confirm experimentally that the numerical approximation converges at the predicted rate. We also show simulations in which we track the free boundary in the domains which resemble the pore scale geometry and in which we test the different modeling assumptions.
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- PAR ID:
- 10456838
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0749-159X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 941-971
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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