Transport phenomena specially the ones that occur in the various engineering disciplines such as tissue engineering and natural environment are often complex to analyze mostly due to the dynamic and geometric complexities; as such, they have been the subject of an active and intense area of research in past decades....
Heterogeneous porous material represents a persistent challenge in the field of engineering. Microscale properties such as the porosity and microchannel torturosity significantly control the macroscale transport characteristics of homogeneous porous medium. Additional complexity is introduced when these small-scale features vary in space. Examples of heterogeneous porous systems include artificial body...
The objective of this study is to investigate the dispersion of solute matter introduced into a fully developed laminar flow in a circular capillary tube under preasymptotic regimes. For this purpose, we have used the method of volume averaging to upscale microscale balance equations for the case of diffusion-convection transport...
Quantification of macroscale transport phenomenon in microfluidic systems is important to many science and engineering disciplines. In part, this is because fully resolved solutions to microscale balance laws over large domains are out of reach with current computational technology. Additionally, engineers are most often interested in some upscaled quantity and...
This work is an attempt to develop a simple physical description for the initial
interactions between a bacterial cell and a substrate surface. This is done by
adopting a view that regards bacterial surface biomolecules not as secondary and
add-on contributors to the potential energy function that characterizes the
overall...
When Biosand filters cannot be constructed with crushed quarry rock due to resource limitations, a suitable alternative filter media is needed. In this research, two crushed quarry rock alternatives were examined. Three bench-scale Biosand filters with crushed rock, beach sand, and heat-treated beach sand media were simultaneously dosed with Willamette...
This work focuses on solute mass transport in a highly heterogeneous two-region porous medium consisting of spherical low-hydraulic conductivity inclusions, embedded in a high-hydraulic conductivity matrix. The transport processes occuring in the system are described by three distinct time scales. The first time scale reflects the characteristic time for convective...
Uranium adsorption to Hanford sediment was studied for various pH, total inorganic carbon concentrations, and total U(VI) concentrations. Both batch and transport studies were done in an attempt to understand the adsorptive trend of U(VI) on Hanford sediment, and the changes in adsorption as both pH and total inorganic carbon...
The conventional advection-dispersion equation cannot adequately describe all processes driving
solute transport in heterogeneous systems. This dissertation focuses on the individual influences
of both chemical (Chapter 2) and physical processes (Chapters 3 and 4) which affect
solute transport. In Chapter 2 we analyzed uranium transport in natural sediment using the...
This research details laboratory assessment of bacterial hydrophobicity, variations in bacterial adhesion properties with growth and extended starvation as well as extension of this assay to colloidal hydrophobicity measurement. Hydrophobicity is an integral component of surface interactions and has been studied extensively for its role in a number of engineering...