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Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column

In the aftermath of oil spills in the sea, clouds of droplets drift into the seawater column and are carried away by sea currents. The fate of the drifting droplets is determined by natural attenuation processes, mainly dissolution into the seawater and biodegradation by oil-degrading microbial comm...

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Autores principales: Kapellos, George E., Paraskeva, Christakis A., Kalogerakis, Nicolas, Doyle, Patrick S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874881/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29439555
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering5010015
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author Kapellos, George E.
Paraskeva, Christakis A.
Kalogerakis, Nicolas
Doyle, Patrick S.
author_facet Kapellos, George E.
Paraskeva, Christakis A.
Kalogerakis, Nicolas
Doyle, Patrick S.
author_sort Kapellos, George E.
collection PubMed
description In the aftermath of oil spills in the sea, clouds of droplets drift into the seawater column and are carried away by sea currents. The fate of the drifting droplets is determined by natural attenuation processes, mainly dissolution into the seawater and biodegradation by oil-degrading microbial communities. Specifically, microbes have developed three fundamental strategies for accessing and assimilating oily substrates. Depending on their affinity for the oily phase and ability to proliferate in multicellular structures, microbes might either attach to the oil surface and directly uptake compounds from the oily phase, or grow suspended in the aqueous phase consuming solubilized oil, or form three-dimensional biofilms over the oil–water interface. In this work, a compound particle model that accounts for all three microbial strategies is developed for the biodegradation of solitary oil microdroplets moving through a water column. Under a set of educated hypotheses, the hydrodynamics and solute transport problems are amenable to analytical solutions and a closed-form correlation is established for the overall dissolution rate as a function of the Thiele modulus, the Biot number and other key parameters. Moreover, two coupled ordinary differential equations are formulated for the evolution of the particle size and used to investigate the impact of the dissolution and biodegradation processes on the droplet shrinking rate.
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spelling pubmed-58748812018-04-02 Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column Kapellos, George E. Paraskeva, Christakis A. Kalogerakis, Nicolas Doyle, Patrick S. Bioengineering (Basel) Article In the aftermath of oil spills in the sea, clouds of droplets drift into the seawater column and are carried away by sea currents. The fate of the drifting droplets is determined by natural attenuation processes, mainly dissolution into the seawater and biodegradation by oil-degrading microbial communities. Specifically, microbes have developed three fundamental strategies for accessing and assimilating oily substrates. Depending on their affinity for the oily phase and ability to proliferate in multicellular structures, microbes might either attach to the oil surface and directly uptake compounds from the oily phase, or grow suspended in the aqueous phase consuming solubilized oil, or form three-dimensional biofilms over the oil–water interface. In this work, a compound particle model that accounts for all three microbial strategies is developed for the biodegradation of solitary oil microdroplets moving through a water column. Under a set of educated hypotheses, the hydrodynamics and solute transport problems are amenable to analytical solutions and a closed-form correlation is established for the overall dissolution rate as a function of the Thiele modulus, the Biot number and other key parameters. Moreover, two coupled ordinary differential equations are formulated for the evolution of the particle size and used to investigate the impact of the dissolution and biodegradation processes on the droplet shrinking rate. MDPI 2018-02-12 /pmc/articles/PMC5874881/ /pubmed/29439555 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering5010015 Text en © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Kapellos, George E.
Paraskeva, Christakis A.
Kalogerakis, Nicolas
Doyle, Patrick S.
Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column
title Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column
title_full Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column
title_fullStr Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column
title_full_unstemmed Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column
title_short Theoretical Insight into the Biodegradation of Solitary Oil Microdroplets Moving through a Water Column
title_sort theoretical insight into the biodegradation of solitary oil microdroplets moving through a water column
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874881/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29439555
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering5010015
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