BIOMS Seminar: Biofilm mechanics using the Immersed Boundary Method

Ranga Sudarsan, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Guelph

Abstract:In the seminar, I will present the results of my effort to simulate flow
induced deformation and detachment of biofilms using an Immersed Boundary (IB)
method. In our work, we represented the biofilm continuum using an Hookean
spring network and simulated detachment of the biofilm using a novel and new
detachment criterion which is based on the concept of an averaged equivalent
continuum stress tensor defined at each IB point in the biofilm.This criteria
provides a unified and consistent framework that handles the different modes of
biofilm detachment effectively and overcomes the ad hoc treatment that results
when we employ the strain along each spring in the network as a detachment
criteria.