Flow and Transport Lab

The Environmental Engineering Flow and Transport Laboratory is set up to conduct experiments in support of basic research on mass and momentum transport phenomena in environmental systems. The lab has particular emphasis for transport phenomena in porous media system, although research is also conducted on a variety of other systems such as biofilms. Examples of current areas of interest include:

• Transport of nonreactive and reactive solutes in highly heterogeneous porous media.
• Pore-scale transport of solutes in porous media
• Reactive transport in biofilms
• Analysis of biofilm stress conditions via reporter proteins and fluorescence microscopy, microelectrodes
• Transport in biofilms in porous media
• Microbial transport in porous media
• Bioremediation of metals in the subsurface using dissimilatory metal reducing bacteria

In addition, we work closely with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory in Richland, Washington. This laboratory provides additional infrastructure for conducting a wide variety of experiments on transport phenomena in scales ranging from Angstroms to meters. In particular, the flow and transport laboratory at OSU works closely with the EMSL NMR facility and the EMSL Intermediate Flow Cells facility (more information about EMSL). A collection of numerical tools for analyzing flow and transport processes are available as computational tools associated with the Flow and Transport Laboratory. The lab has access to a 48 node Beowulf cluster based on an Itanium 2 platform, and an 8-way Sun V880 with 16 GB of shared memory for parallel or large serial jobs. Flow and transport codes for transport in porous media (e.g, STOMP from PNNL) and computational fluid dynamics and mass transport on unstructured meshes (P3D from PNNL) are available for computational research associated with experimental work.

S. oneidensis biofilm	NMR image of a biofilm of Shewanella onidensis	Simulation of the pore-scale velocity field

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