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Applied Mathematics Colloquium: Dr Malgo Peszynska

Oregon State University

Location

Online

Date & Time

November 13, 2020, 2:00 pm3:00 pm

Description

Title: Modeling biofilm and flow dynamics in multiscale porous media

Abstract: We consider a coupled PDE system for viscous flow coupled to biofilm and 
nutrient dynamics in porous media, at the scale of microns to mm. The 
challenges include the biofilm formation process itself which features a 
free boundary surrounding the gooey highly viscous region called EPS 
produced by the biomass. Our model involves a parabolic variational 
inequality to enforce the volume constraint, which we recently extended to 
multiple microbial species cooperating or competing for the same 
resources. We also consider an alternative: a degenerate and singular 
nonlinear diffusion model, and we seek adaptively the strength of the 
singularity so that the volume constraint is automatically satisfied. Our 
results include a rigorous convergence result for a finite element model 
for a reduced version of this problem as well as large scale computations 
using data from micro-CT x-imaging followed by numerical upscaling to 
Darcy scale. This is joint work with many former and current students and 
collaborators to be named including Anna Trykozko, Dorthe Wildenschild, 
Tim Costa, Joseph Umhoefer, Azhar Alhammali, Lisa Bigler, Choah Shin, and 
Naren Vohra.