Clogging Time of a Filter

Abstract

We study the time until a filter becomes clogged due to the trapping of suspended particles as they pass through a porous medium. This trapping progressively impedes and eventually stops the flow of the carrier fluid. We develop a simple description for the pore geometry and the motion of the suspended particles which, together with extreme-value statistics, predicts that the distribution of times until a filter clogs has a power-law long-time tail, with an infinite mean clogging time. These results and its consequences are in accord with simulations on a square lattice porous network.