Bacterial Transport in Gas-Sparged Porous Medium

Abstract

To improve the feasibility of soil-aquifer remediation using bioaugmentation, more efficient methods are needed to widely disperse pollutant-degrading bacteria in porous media. Under water-saturated conditions, bacteria readily adhere to soil particles, but under unsaturated conditions, bacteria preferentially accumulate at the air-water interface. Air sparging a saturated porous medium produces a mobile water interface that was hypothesized to facilitate bacterial transport. To investigate whether gas sparging increased bacterial transport relative to saturated-water conditions, the transport of three strains of bacteria and negatively charged microspheres of different relative hydrophobicities