Dispersion of motile bacteria in a porous medium

TL;DR

This study investigates how bacterial motility influences their transport in porous media, revealing active retention and enhanced dispersion effects, and introduces a new physical model to predict these behaviors at larger scales.

Contribution

It provides a novel physical model combining bacterial motility and pore-scale flow dynamics to accurately predict bacterial dispersion in porous media.

Findings

Motile bacteria exhibit active retention and faster downstream movement.

Bacterial motility enhances dispersion due to exchange between flow channels and low-flow regions.

The proposed model successfully reproduces experimental observations and predicts macroscale transport.

Abstract

Understanding flow and transport of bacteria in porous media is crucial to technologies such as bioremediation, biomineralization or enhanced oil recovery. While physicochemical bacteria filtration is well-documented, recent studies showed that bacterial motility plays a key role in the transport process. Flow and transport experiments performed in microfluidic chips containing randomly placed obstacles confirmed that the distributions of non-motile particles stays compact, whereas for the motile strains, the distributions are characterized by both significant retention as well as fast downstream motion. For motile bacteria, the detailed microscopic study of individual bacteria trajectories reveals two salient features: (i) the emergence of an active retention process triggered by motility, (ii) enhancement of dispersion due to the exchange between fast flow channels and low flow regions in the vicinity of the solid grains. We propose a physical model based on a continuous time random walk approach. This approach accounts for bacteria dispersion via variable pore-scale flow velocities through a Markov model for equidistant particle speeds. Motility of bacteria is modeled by a two-rate trapping process that accounts for the motion towards and active trapping at the obstacles. This approach captures the forward tails observed for the distribution of bacteria displacements, and quantifies an enhanced hydrodynamic dispersion effect that originates in the interaction between flow at the pore-scale and bacterial motility. The model reproduces the experimental observations, and predicts bacteria dispersion and transport at the macroscale.