Determining the minimum sticking efficiency of six environmental Escherichia coli isolates - Transport of Multiple Escherichia Coli Transport in Saturated Porous Media - page 52

above. For UCFL-94, the computed Α values were invariably low, especially compared to the
other strains. Overall, in AGW, for all E. coli strains we used, the computed Α values for the
more distant column segments ranged between 0.006 - 0.283, and the order of magnitude of
these low values (10 -3 -10 -2 ) was similar to those observed in DI.

With eq. (4.3) , for both the DI and AGW experiments, the fractions of retained bacteria over
total bacteria mass in the influent suspension were computed, and the resulting distributions were
plotted against the computed sticking efficiencies ( Fig. 4.2a and b ) . On log-log scale, all
distributions plotted more or less on a straight line for both the DI and AGW sets of experiments.

1.E+00

fraction of input m ass
that exited the colum n
UCFL-71 0.21
UCFL-94 0.30
UCFL-131 0.07
UCFL-167 0.04
UCFL-263 0.36
UCFL-348 0.001

1.E-01

1.E-02

1.E-03

UCFL-71 UCFL-94

1.E-04

UCFL-131 UCFL-167

UCFL-263 UCFL-348

1.E-05

1.E-05 1.E-04 1.E-03 1.E-02 1.E-01 1.E+00

Α i (-)

Fig.4.2a: Retained bacteria, as fraction of input mass ( F ) and corresponding sticking

efficiency for the DI experiments. Solid lines indicate fitted power law
distributions .

.