A confined DLA model of microbial biofilm in wastewater treatment systems

Abstract

Microbial biofilms are encountered in a wide variety of applications, especially in wastewater treatment systems. Biofilm dynamics in wastewater treatment has been paid much attention, and the simulation of the biofilm growth has been studied with many approaches in recent years. To simulate the real microbial biofilm growth, this paper proposed the confined diffusion limited aggregation (DLA) models with spatial restriction and angle restriction effect to describe the biofilm growth. The fractal dimension, as one of kinetic or structural parameter of the simulated growing biofilm, is calculated, and main impacts of fractal dimension on real biofilm engineering were accordingly discussed. These studies may not only provide some implications for the academic investigations of complex structure and growing process for biofilms, but also find important engineering implications.