Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

VITELBIO

Participants : Fadia Gafsi, Ihab Haidar, Jérôme Harmand, Mouna Jraou, Alain Rapaport.

The former ARC VITELBIO (VIrtual TELluric BIOreactors) gathers biologists, agronomist, micro-biologists, soil physicists and mathematicians about the modelling of heterogeneity in soil, and its role on microbiological functions. An important activity of the project has consisted in the development of a user friendly software for designing networks, simulating the dynamics and exploiting the results, with the help of ITK Company (see Section 5.1 ).

The software has allowed to explore the yield properties of several configurations of interconnections (serial, parallel, diffusive, dead zone and more sophisticated ones). Part of them has then being analytically studied in the PhD work of H. Haidar.

The VITELBIO project has been also financed by INRA for the purchase of four experimental chemostats settled at the LBE Narbonne. The training period of F. Gafsi and M. Jraou at the LBE and then in Montpellier have aimed to compare numerical predictions with real experiments.