Transport of multiple Escherichia coli strains in saturated porous media

Abstract

All rights reserved. No part of this publication or the information contained herein may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written prior permission from the publishers. Although all care is taken to ensure the integrity and quality of this publication and the information herein, no responsibility is assumed by the publishers nor the author for any damage to the property or persons as a result of operation or use of this publication and/or the information contained hereinPublished by: CRC Press/Balkema PO Box 447, 2300 AK Leiden, the Netherlands e-mail: Pub.NL@taylorandfrancis.com www.crcpress.com -www.taylorandfrancis.co.uk -www.ba.balkema.nl ISBN 978-0-415-62104-5 (Taylor & Francis Group) AcknowledgementsGod makes things beautiful in his own time, this work got to this stage through mental, physical and emotional strength provided by God Almighty. I will like to express my sincere gratitude to all who in various ways contributed to the making of this thesis, and would like to state that many people directly or indirectly contributed to this thesis and those whose names are not mentioned here are the very good friends who would not need their names to be mentioned here to show appreciation to their contribution towards this thesis.I am most grateful to my promoter Professor Stefan Uhlenbrook and supervisor Dr. JanWillem Foppen for their help and guidance. They made this thesis a reality. My profound appreciation to Dr. Wilfred Rölling of the Vrije University, Amsterdam for offering me the opportunity to do part of this work in his laboratory. Special acknowledgements goes to the entire staff of the UNESCO-IHE laboratory, they tirelessly worked behind the scenes to ensure successful running of experiments. I will also like to offer sincere appreciation to Eric Oduroh-Boahene of Geogroup Limited in Kumasi, Ghana, and Michael Nii Armah Aryeetey of the Ghana National Petroluem Corporation for continuously reminding me of the importance of this work and encouraging me. Groundwater contamination by faecal matterAccording to the WHO, an estimated one billion people lack access to an improved water supply and two million deaths per year are attributable to unsafe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene. In addition, many countries still report cholera to the WHO (WHO, 2004). Groundwater may be an important source of water for safe drinking and industrial water supplies, however, many water borne disease outbreaks are known to have been caused by the consumption of groundwater contaminated by pathogenic microorganisms (Goss et al., 1998;Macler and Merkle, 2000;Bhattacharjee et al., 2002;Close et al., 2006;Powell et al., 2003). Pathogenic microorganisms find their way into the sub-surface through the spreading of sewerage sludge on fields, leakage from waste disposal sites and landfills (Taylor et al., 2004), infiltration from cesspits, septic tank infiltration beds, and pit latrines (Foppen ...

Microbial Groundwater Quality Status of Hand-Dug Wells and Boreholes in the Dodowa Area of Ghana

“…For the lower-risk boreholes it is difficult to determine the source of contamination as there are no identified sources of contamination near the boreholes. The possible presence of dual-porosity hydrogeological characteristics in the area may be one of the reasons for the high bacteriological content in boreholes [ 27 ]. In dual-porosity hydrogeological systems preferential flow paths ensure rapid groundwater flow in inter-connected geological discontinuities (e.g., fractures, faults and joints) [ 28 , 29 ].…”

Application of Reactive Transport Modeling to Growth and Transport of Microorganisms in the Capillary Fringe

“…In the work by Lutterodt (2012), many flow‐through experiments were conducted to investigate the adhesion kinetics of different E. coli strains. The adhesion rates for different strains may differ by many orders of magnitude (10 −2 –10 −7 s −1 ) and the adhesive kinetic needs to be established for every strain separately.…”