Discontinuous Galerkin methods for simulating bioreactive transport of viruses in porous media

Primal discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods are formulated to solve the transport equations for modeling migration and survival of viruses with kinetic and equilibrium adsorption in porous media. An entropy analysis is conducted to show that DG schemes are numerically stable and that the free energy of a DG approximation decreases with time in a manner similar to the exact solution. Combining results for free and attached virus concentrations, we establish optimal a priori error estimates for the coupled partial and ordinary differential equations of virus transport. Numerical results suggest that DG can treat bioreactive transport of viruses over a wide range of modeling parameters, including both advection- and dispersion-dominated problems. In addition, it is shown that DG can sharply capture local phenomena of virus transport with dynamic mesh adaptation.