Brandon S. Lindley, University of South Carolina


Multi-Component Models for Biofilm-Drug/Disinfectant Interaction

Abstract: We develop a three-component model for a biofilm/solvent mixture in which the extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) network, bacteria, and effective solvent, consisting of the solvent, nutrient, drugs, etc., are modeled explicitly. This three-component mixture is assumed to be incompressible, while inter-component mixing, dissipation, and conversion (growth) are allowed. A linear stability analysis is conducted on constant equilibria, revealing up to two unstable modes corresponding to possible bacterial and EPS production induced biofilm growth dependent upon the range of model parameters. Transient simulations in one and two dimensions are carried out to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of the EPS network, bacteria distribution, drug and nutrient distribution under planar shear flows, and with respect to a host of diffusivity models for the drug and nutrients.

Mentor: Qi Wang (University of South Carolina)

Collaborators: Tianyu Zhang (Montana State University) and Nick Cogan (Florida State University)