Growth kinetic and transport of mixed microbial cultures in subsurface environments

Moein Jahanbani Veshareh*, Hamidreza M. Nick

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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    Abstract

    Subsurface porous environments harbor various microbial communities that control ecosystem functions such as geochemical cycling, bioremediation and ore formation. To simulate bioprocesses derived by microbial communities, Monod equation and cardinal models are utilized to model growth kinetics dependency on substrate concentration and temperature, respectively. In this work, we illustrate that Monod equation with constant parameters cannot characterize community derived microbial processes. Additionally, the growth-temperature dependency of a community of microorganisms does not follow a specific mathematical model. We suggest an equivalent strain model that can estimate the rate of community-derived metabolisms (RCDM) in non-isothermal reactive transport processes. We consider a one-dimensional flow system with four different simulation scenarios of immobile biomass-limited electron donor, mobile biomass-limited electron donor, immobile biomass-unlimited electron donor and mobile biomass-unlimited electron donor. We illustrate that the equivalent strain can efficiently characterize (with absolute normalized deviation (AND)<4%) the behavior of the test community when electron donor availability is limited. In contrast to the limited electron donor availability cases, we show that the equivalent strain is not capable of characterizing the test community when electron donor is abundant, leading to a maximum AND of 70%. The deviation of the equivalent strain from the test community is due to the inability of the equivalent strain to represent the effects of community evolution on RCDM and biomass deactivation that happens due to temperature variations.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number103929
    JournalAdvances in Water Resources
    Volume153
    Number of pages10
    ISSN0309-1708
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2021

    Keywords

    • Monod kinetics
    • Growth kinetics
    • Reservoir souring
    • Reactive transport
    • Non-isothermal

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