Modeling biologically reactive transport in porous media

A one-dimensional biofilm-based reactive transport model is developed to simulate biologically mediated substrate metabolism and contaminant destruction in saturated porous media. The resulting equations are solved by a finite-difference based, three-level, operator-split approach. The numerical solution procedure is stable, easy-to-code, and computationally efficient. As an example problem, biological denitrification and fortuitous CT destruction processes in one-dimensional porous media is studied. The simulation results of the example problem show that the present model can be successfully used to predict biological processes and nutrient/contaminant transport in saturated porous media