Silver Nanoparticle Antibacterial Kinetics

Silver nanoparticles are one of the most widely deployed nanomaterials in consumer and medical products — wound dressings, textiles, water filters — because they are bactericidal even at very low mass loadings. This simulator renders a cluster of instanced silver nanoparticles releasing Ag⁺ ions into solution and a colony of instanced bacterial rods dying off as the dissolved-ion dose accumulates. Shrinking the particle diameter raises its surface-to-volume ratio (S/V = 3/r for a sphere), speeding up dissolution under a Noyes–Whitney-style release equation, while the resulting Ag⁺ concentration drives bacterial kill through pseudo-first-order Chick–Watson disinfection kinetics — the same concentration-times-time (CT) law used to size real water-treatment disinfectant doses. Live readouts track dissolved Ag⁺ concentration, colony viability and elapsed exposure time as the wave of cell death spreads through the randomly-thresholded population.