RT Journal Article
T1 Biofilms as poroelastic materials
A1 Carpio Rodríguez, Ana María
A1 Cebrián, Elena
A1 Vidal Lloret, Perfecto
AB Biofilms are bacterial aggregates encased in a self-produced polymeric matrix which attach to moist surfaces and are extremely resistant to chemicals and antibiotics. Recent experiments show that their structure is defined by the interplay of elastic deformations and liquid transport within the biofilm, in response to the cellular activity and the interaction with the surrounding environment. We propose a poroelastic model for elastic deformation and liquid transport in three dimensional biofilms spreading on agar surfaces. The motion of the boundaries can be described by the combined use of Von Kármán type approximations for the agar/biofilm interface and thin film approximations for the biofilm/air interface. Bacterial activity informs the macroscopic continuous model through source terms and residual stresses, either phenomenological or derived from microscopic models. We present a procedure to estimate the structure of such residual stresses, based on a simple cellular automata description of bacterial activity. Inspired by image processing, we show that a filtering strategy effectively smooths out the rough tensors provided by the stochastic cellular automata rules, allowing us to insert them in the macroscopic model without numerical instability.
PB Elsevier
SN 0020-7462
YR 2019
FD 2019-03
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/13409
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/13409
LA eng
NO Carpio Rodríguez, A. M., Cebrían, E. y Vidal Lloret, P. «Biofilms as Poroelastic Materials». International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics, vol. 109, marzo de 2019, pp. 1-8. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnonlinmec.2018.10.012.
NO Ministerio de Economía, Comercio y Empresa (España)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 18 abr 2025