Visualization and evaluation of flow during water filtration: Parameterization and sensitivity analysis

Technical University of Liberec, Studentská 1402/2, 461 17, Liberec 1, Czech Republic

^a Corresponding author: petr.bilek@tul.cz

Published online: 28 March 2016

Abstract

This paper deals with visualization and evaluation of flow during filtration of water seeded by artificial microscopic particles. Planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) is a wide spread method for visualization and non-invasive characterization of flow. However the method uses fluorescent dyes or fluorescent particles in special cases. In this article the flow is seeded by non-fluorescent monodisperse polystyrene particles with the diameter smaller than one micrometer. The monodisperse sub-micron particles are very suitable for testing of textile filtration materials. Nevertheless non-fluorescent particles are not useful for PLIF method. A water filtration setup with an optical access to the place, were a tested filter is mounted, was built and used for the experiments. Concentration of particles in front of and behind the tested filter in a laser light sheet measured is and the local filtration efficiency expressed is. The article describes further progress in the measurement. It was carried out sensitivity analysis, parameterization and performance of the method during several simulations and experiments.