Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Principal investigator

harald hornProf. Harald Horn is professor for water chemistry and water technology at KIT. His research work within the last 10 years focused mainly on mass transport and substrate utilization in complex biofilm systems. The general idea behind this research is the coupling of processes driven by physics on the one hand and biology on the other hand. The influence of physics in biofilm research is underestimated. Morphology and growth of biofilm structures are very often driven by physics and less influenced by biology. The soft money generated since 2005 both in 48 fundamental (BMBF and DFG) and industrial research (Veolia, Siemens) projects is around 4.2 M Euro.

Contact

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Engler-Bunte-Ring 1
D-76131 Karlsruhe
Germany

e-mail: harald.horn@kit.edu

People

Dr. rer. nat. Michael Wagner is a post-doctoral researcher at the Chair of Water Chemistry and Water Technology at KIT. His research focus is at understanding the fluid- structure interaction of biofilms. To reliably visualize representative biofilm structures at the mesoscale (mm-scale) is the main objective. In situ and non-invasive three- dimensional imaging techniques such as optical coherence tomography are applied to enlighten the strong coupling of the physical biofilm structure to mass transport and transfer processes. Because biofilm characteristics vary between the scales of observation in terms of time and space, a combined use of imaging modalities (physical and chemical) and modelling approaches are investigated, too.

Florian Blauert

Technological Evolution of Synergy Between Physicochemical and Living Systems