CARTELLIER A., HUANG Z., SECHET P.
Biofilms play a major role in the water and soil treatment technologies. The understanding of the coupling between the growth of the cell tissue and the hydrodynamics remains a big issue in order to develop multi scale modeling with closure terms. Although widespread in industrial facilities, anchored cellular culture remains extremely hard to model. It slows down severely the development of new technologies dedicated to new pollutants treatment. We use a variety of experimental techniques: flux cytometry, 3D X-ray tomography at ESRF (a first realization on this kind of media, Biotech. & Bioeng. 2013), confocal microscopy, HD imaging. With these techniques we characterize the evolution and the multi scale distribution of the biofilm (from the cell to the scale of the whole reactor as well as the mesoscale pores of the bioreactor)(Chem. Eng. Sc. 2011, Biomicrofluidic 2013). We gathered a consortium of researchers from various Grenoble labs: LEGI, LRP, 3SR and LTHE. Currently we perform more systematic studies (i) confocal microscopy study of the structuration of the biofilm under controlled flow (ii) Xray tomography analysis of the microstructure of the biofilm in porous media and coupling with hydrodynamics.
