Critical occlusion via biofilm induced calcite precipitation in porous media

A model for biofilm induced calcite precipitation with pressure driven flow is presented at the scale of a single pore within a porous medium. The system, an extension of previous work (Zhang and Klapper 2010 Water Sci. Technol. 61 2957–64, Zhang and Klapper 2011 Int. J. Non-Linear Mech. 46 657–66), is based on a mixture model including biomaterial, mineral, and water with dissolved components. Computational results suggest the possibility of critical occlusion in the sense that there is a distinguished trans-pore pressure head such that for pressure drops below this level, pore clogging occurs relatively quickly while for pressure drops above, clogging occurs after much longer times if at all. Beyond its relevance to engineered biofilm applications, this phenomenon is suggestive of the subtleties of embedding simple biofilm models in larger media.