Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

3-D Computational Investigation Of Viscoelastic Biofilms Using Gpus, Paisa Seeluangsawat

Theses and Dissertations

A biofilm is a slimy colony of bacteria and the materials they secrete, collectively called “extracellular polymeric substances (EPS)”. The EPS consists mostly of bio-polymers, which cross link into a network that behave viscoelastically under deformation. We propose a single-fluid multi-component phase field model of biofilms that captures this behavior, then use numerical simulations on GPUs to investigate the biofilm’s growth and its hydrodynamics properties.