Dr. Theresa B Oehmke is a Postdoctoral Associate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Hampshire. Oehmke earned a PhD in Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2021 and a BS in Environmental Engineering from MIT in 2015. Oehmke’s research is in Environmental Fluid Mechanics, specifically, the transport of particles and pollutants in turbulence. Current projects include the transport of methane in the atmosphere and the transport of seeds in the Great Bay Estuary. Oehmke’s PhD discussed the rotation and dissolution of non-spherical particles in turbulence.

The dissolution of freely moving particles in turbulence is very important for those organisms that use chemical tracers to orient themselves and find their way through the well-mixed oceanic environment. These organisms practice chemotaxis to follow the trail of dissolved solute to its location, which, for example, could be a clump of organic matter such as marine snow. In this presentation, we look at a variety of methods for predicting the rate of solute flux from the surface of organic particles. We evaluate the influence of aggregate size, volume, surface area, and density on solute dissolution and transport in the water column. We draw conclusions about the influence of density, boundary layers, and surface area to volume ratio, showing that a higher surface area to volume ratio means more mass flux and a larger chemical signal for chemotactic organisms to follow.

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