Author
Listed:
- Fathi, Ahmed
- Mattei, Maria Rosaria
- Fermoso, Fernando G.
- Frunzo, Luigi
Abstract
A homogeneous soil-based field-scale model was constructed to study the biosorption of heavy metals, incorporating the impact of biofilms and their interactions with heavy metals at the pore scale. The model assumes a laminar flow through a porous medium in an advection-dominated regime. A volume averaging method was applied to build a macroscale model by upscaling the biofilm growth process from the pore scale. The biofilm model consists of two mono-species biofilms that grow separately within the soil pores, participate in biosorption processes with toxic heavy metals, and undergo growth due to dissolved substrate consumption and suspended bacteria attachment. A Monod-like kinetic rate coupled with intraparticle diffusion was employed to model the heavy metal concentration within the biofilm. This kinetic model, based on the Langmuir isotherm, was extended to include the adsorption rate change over time, considering the saturation mechanisms. The upscaling process results in a stiff system of hyperbolic equations, which are solved numerically using an in-house code implemented on the MATLAB platform, utilizing a second-order accurate central scheme (UCS2). Various scenarios were simulated by varying the adsorption affinity constant, metal inhibition of the biofilm, metal inflow concentration, planktonic cell inflow concentration, and flow velocity. Simulations have demonstrated that biofilms can prevent toxic metals from reaching groundwater through biosorption. Increased biofilm biomass, and thus, better biosorption effectiveness, was observed with higher maximum sorption capacity, inhibition coefficients, and planktonic cell inflow concentrations. Conversely, biosorption effectiveness decreases with increasing adsorption affinity coefficients, metal inflow concentrations, and flow rates.
Suggested Citation
Fathi, Ahmed & Mattei, Maria Rosaria & Fermoso, Fernando G. & Frunzo, Luigi, 2025.
"A multiscale model of heavy metal biosorption in porous media by one-dimensional biofilms,"
Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (MATCOM), Elsevier, vol. 238(C), pages 585-603.
Handle:
RePEc:eee:matcom:v:238:y:2025:i:c:p:585-603
DOI: 10.1016/j.matcom.2025.05.009
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to
for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:matcom:v:238:y:2025:i:c:p:585-603. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/mathematics-and-computers-in-simulation/ .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.