A diffuse-domain-based numerical method for a chemotaxis-fluid model

In this paper, we consider a coupled chemotaxis-fluid system that models self-organized collective behavior of oxytactic bacteria in a sessile drop. This model describes the biological chemotaxis phenomenon in the fluid environment and couples a convective chemotaxis system for the oxygen-consuming and oxytactic bacteria with the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations subject to a gravitational force, which is proportional to the relative surplus of the cell density compared to the water density. We develop a new positivity preserving and high-resolution method for the studied chemotaxis-fluid system. Our method is based on the diffuse-domain approach, which we use to derive a new chemotaxis-fluid diffuse-domain (cf-DD) model for simulating bioconvection in complex geometries. The drop domain is imbedded into a larger rectangular domain, and the original boundary is replaced by a diffuse interface with finite thickness. The original chemotaxis-fluid system is reformulated on the larger domain with additional source terms that approximate the boundary conditions on the physical interface. We show that the cf-DD model converges to the chemotaxis-fluid model asymptotically as the width of the diffuse interface shrinks to zero. We numerically solve the resulting cf-DD system by a second-order hybrid finite-volume finite-difference method and demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach on a number of numerical experiments that showcase several interesting chemotactic phenomena in sessile drops of different shapes, where the bacterial patterns depend on the droplet geometries.