Impact of Dual Substrate Limitation on Biodenitrification Modeling in Porous Media

Abstract

In this work, we consider a model of the biodenitrification process taking place in a spatially-distributed bioreactor, and we take into account the limitation of the kinetics by both the carbon source and the oxidized nitrogen. This model concerns a single type of bacteria growing on nitrate, which splits into adherent bacteria or free bacteria in the liquid, taking all interactions into account. The system obtained consists of four diffusion-convection-reaction equations for which we show the existence and uniqueness of a global solution. The system is approximated by a standard finite element method that satisfies an optimal a priori error estimate. We compare the results obtained for three forms of the growth function: single substrate limiting, “multiplicative” form, and “minimum” form. We highlight the limitation of the ‘ single substrate limiting model”, where the dependency of the bacterial growth on the nitrate is neglected, and find that the “minimum” model gives numerical results closer to the experimental results.