Gradient and Percolative Clogging in Depth Filtration

Abstract

The phenomenon of clogging in depth filtration is investigated, in which a dirty fluid is "cleaned" by the trapping of dirt particles within the pore space during flow through a porous medium. This gives rise to a self-generated gradient percolation process which exhibits a power law distribution for the density of trapped particles at downstream distance x from the input, both in idealized and lattice networks. Implications for efficient filter design are also mentioned.