Experiments and Simulations on the Cleaning of a Swellable Soil in Plane Channel Flow

ABSTRACT

The cleaning behavior of a soil with physical properties that depend on the wetting time is studied experimentally via the local phosphorescence detection method and simulated numerically in fully developed plane channel flow for Reynolds numbers up to 30,000. A computationally inexpensive general cleaning model is proposed, adopting an existing removal model and coupling it to the turbulent flow field. The influence of the soil on the flow is neglected and the transient behavior of the soil during cleaning is modeled in the form of a transient Dirichlet boundary condition. This approach is innovative for computational fluid dynamics of this phenomenon. The way of determining the model parameters from the experiment is described. The comparison of the simulation results with experimental data reveals very good suitability of the model in the case of a starch soil. A similar good agreement is found for data for a model protein foulant in tube flow from the literature.